US Police Shot More People as Previously Thought, Mostly Black People - Reports

The US has been facing a persistent pattern of police shooting people, especially black Americans.

WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — Police officers across the United States shot at 4,098 Americans between 2010 and 2016, double the amount previously known with a higher number of those shot being black, Vice News reported Monday.

According to the outlet, of the 4,098 Americans shot between 2010-2016, 1,378 resulted in fatalities and 2,720 were non-fatal, while as many as 700 police missed their targets altogether. Roughly 967 were shot and wounded but survived.

Vice News said their data was retrieved from 50 police departments in the United States representing 148,000 officers serving 54 million people. The data shows that police shoot black people at a higher rate than any other data analysis has previously shown.

The report claimed that US Attorney General Jeff Sessions had "gutted" the Justice Department’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services. The Office conducted federal training and accountability programs for local police departments.

Cities that adopted the Justice Department's recommendations saw a 32 percent decline in officer-involved shootings in the first year, but Sessions believes the federal government should not get involved in local policing matters.

Over the past year, the United States has been dealing with a number of high profile police killings of mostly African-American men, spurring a national debate around the issue of an excessive police force and racial profiling.

READ MORE: Ex-Cop Pleads Guilty to 2015 Shooting of Unarmed Black Man in South Carolina

A 2015 case of then-policeman Michael Slager, shooting eight times in 50-year-old Walter Scott in Charleston, South Carolina, sparked so-called Black Lives Matter protests. The shooting case was seen as part of a persistent pattern of police killing black Americans, while Charleston activists called for the mayor’s resignation and demanded citizen oversight of policing.

After a rash of high-profile police killings of African Americans, then-President Barack Obama called for a Task Force on 21st Century Policing, which recommended policy, oversight, training, education, and community engagement, as ways to help bridge the divide between police and the communities that they were sworn to protect.

Earlier this year, a group of researchers, led by the University of Louisville, Kentucky, conducted a study, analyzing information on 990 police killings since 2015. Through their analysis, researchers sought to discern whether police implicitly deem certain ethnic groups more threatening, and found that there were half as many black victims of police killings as white in 2015, but that there were more unarmed black victims than white.