The Counted found that a plurality of killings by police in 2016 began with attempted traffic or street stops by officers. Almost 29% of deadly incidents last year developed from police trying to pull over a vehicle or approaching someone in public, including some potential suspects for crimes.
Another one in five killings by police last year started with calls reporting domestic violence or some other domestic disturbance. Data analyzed by the justice department shows that domestic calls are the deadliest for police officers.
Police killed 161 people while moving to arrest known suspects or to execute warrants of some kind. They used force fatally in nearly 259 cases shortly after someone had committed a crime – 188 of them violent crimes and 71 nonviolent.
More than 200 people killed by law enforcement in 2016 had fired a gun at or near officers before they were killed in return fire, according to police and witness reports on the incidents. Another 50 were accused of attacking officers without a gun. And 142 allegedly pointed, raised or levelled a gun or a nonlethal gun at police before being killed.
Authorities also alleged that 135 people were killed as they appeared to reach for a potential weapon, waistband or pocket suspiciously, although 18 of these people turned out to be unarmed. One hundred and fifty-four people were accused of refusing to drop a weapon of some kind in the moments before they were killed by officers. And 201 others were said to have been killed after they struggled, fought with or advanced on officers.
At least one in every five people killed by police in 2016 was mentally ill or in the midst of a mental health crisis when they were killed, according to reports following the incident by law enforcement, local media and relatives.
In October, for instance, Deborah Danner, a 66-year-old woman with schizophrenia, was killed by a New York police officer in a shooting the city’s mayor called “tragic and unacceptable”. Police went to Danner’s Bronx apartment after receiving a phone call from a neighbor who said Danner was acting strangely. An officer opened fire when Danner swung a baseball bat near his head.
“What is clear in this one instance: we failed,” NYPD chief James O’Neill later said. In more than 80 killings by police in 2016, the initial contact with law enforcement began following a call reporting that the person was suicidal or harming themselves, or attempting to harm themselves.
Of the at least 35 military veterans killed by police last year, at least 20 had been diagnosed with a mental illness or were having a mental health crisis. In August, Ronald Smith, a Gulf war veteran, sought help via an online crisis chat service for veterans. The chat service alerted deputies in Pickaway County, Ohio, who arrived at Smith’s home and fatally shot the 45-year-old sometime after arriving and finding him armed with a gun.
Police officers were charged with crimes in relation to 18 deaths from 2016, along with several others from the previous year. These charges included the arrests of officers involved in the high-profile killings of Terence Crutcher in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Philando Castile near St Paul, Minnesota.
Several lesser-known fatal cases have also led to criminal prosecutions, such as that of Deravis “Caine” Rogers, an unarmed black man who was killed in June by an officer in Atlanta, Georgia. Local authorities charged officer James Burns with murder and other crimes. Investigators said Rogers was driving away from a parking lot when Burns opened fire without pausing to see whether Rogers was the suspect he was seeking.
Sessions’ nomination has dismayed activists who only a year ago felt the US was heading toward bipartisan policing reform. Sessions has accused Black Lives Matter of being “really radical” and driving up crime by deterring officers from policing effectively. He has also consistently attacked investigations of local forces by the justice department.
A report published on Friday by New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice warned that Sessions’ aversion to what he has called federal “interference” may lead to a resurgence in abuse.
Police departments “could be emboldened to escalate their use of force, exacerbating the racial tension plaguing cities across the country,” said the report, by Ames Grawert, a counsel and former prosecutor in New York.
