On August 9th, 2014, Michael Brown Jr. was shot by police in Ferguson, a case which brought national attention to the fact that there was a massive problem between those who are enforcing the law and those who are subject to it, in particular in black communities throughout the United States.
As a result, a number of projects have launched that aim to track the interactions between police and people, one of which is the non-profit organisation called Fatal Encounters. They have compiled the statistics on deaths through police interaction in the United States, dating back to January 1, 2000.
Not only is the total number of deaths shockingly high, but as the Fatal Encounters site outlines, the idea behind the project is to get the details behind those deaths something that neither the police nor the FBI are obliged to keep track of.
While the police are obliged to report homicides, they're not obliged to report the circumstances that lead to the death, and as a result, the database that Fatal Encounters are putting together represents a much more complete picture of why tensions have been so high in the aftermath of further protests in Ferguson.
Mapping Police Violence have also been looking at the figures and have created a map that shows the number of deaths so far in 2015, and where they took place.
The overall picture painted is one that highlights just how dysfunctional the system is, something that former Michael Wood Jr., a former Baltimore cop, speaks about candidly in an interview with Slate as they followed him around his old beat.
