LAist reports
USC researchers have created a database that tracks deadly police incidents across the country.
The National Officer Involved Homicide Database collects information from police departments and government agencies on deaths involving law enforcement officers. It supplements previous work done by Fatal Encounters, a site run by journalist and USC research associate D. Brian Burghart.
Brian Finch, a researcher with USC’s Dornsife Center for Economic and Social Research, led the development of the database. He said it started with a question spurred by a Washington Post article on police killings a few years ago: “How many citizens do U.S. police kill in a given year? And the answer was, we simply don’t know.”
“Being kind of a data junkie, I said, ‘This seems to be something we should be able to collect.’”
Finch said his team collected information on more than 30,000 police encounters in which someone died over the last 20 years. In Los Angeles County, Finch said there are an average of 50 a year.
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