There is Now an App that Sends a Push Notification to Your Phone Every Time Police Kill Someone

In 2014, Only 224 of 18,000 U.S law enforcement agencies reported a fatal shooting by their officers. The overwhelming majority of police departments are not required, nor seem to even care about reporting on the number of people they kill.

“It is unacceptable that The Washington Post and the Guardian newspaper from the U.K. are becoming the lead source of information about violent encounters between police and civilians. That is not good for anybody,” FBI Director James Comey lamented, last year, noting that the media is doing a better job than they are.

There is no real system in place to count the number of people killed by police, beyond the good work of independent media and advocacy groups. The FBI relies on a voluntary system where local police departments report data on deadly use of force — if they so choose.

Naturally, most departments refuse to submit data.

Thanks to the vigilance of concerned media and advocacy groups, however, cops are finding it quite hard to hide their violence.

In January 2016, police killed 113 people — at least one person was fatally gunned down by a cop every day that month. One particularly deadly day, January 27, saw ten people meet their fate, thanks to the police. On average, that is almost 4 people a day.

And there is no indication this tragic epidemic will end soon.

We know that American cops killed 113 people in January, not because the police told us about them, but because there are hard working people out there who care about this vital information.

Sites like  Fatal Encounters, or Cop Crisis, with its beautifully coded graphical interface, count police killings as a public service. Killed By Police also ran one of the most comprehensive databases on police killings as they listed 1,205 total killings by law enforcement for 2015, but hasn’t yet listed any statistics for 2016.

Last year, police killings reached such a level of media coverage, that even the Guardian got in on the tally with their project The Counted.

Until recently, Americans relied solely on the state to report their own killings — a truly futile cause.

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