1,000+ includes all people killed by police, most of them armed. You need to filter for unarmed killings. Hover over "weapon" and click unarmed. It's 350 from 2015 to the present.
The time I was arrested at a protest, I was charged with carrying a sharpened stick (aka, protest sign). I didn't even have that, though... It was a lie in the report.
The police regularly distort their reporting. There is no centralized collecting of police violence statistics, in large part because they have organized against the collection of those statistics. The 1,000+ number will be far less subject to manipulation.
Here's some additional reporting. The 2014 Tampa Bay Times project to track police violence found 827 people shot in a year. In Florida alone. They spent a huge amount of effort on the reporting because the statistics were sometimes not collected and usually not trustworthy where they were.
another ~140 were armed with "toy weapons", such as the infamous shooting of Tamir Rice. But it's unclear whether that should go into the category of "unarmed" since this is still a threat perceived by police. Here is an image of Rice's toy gun: https://www.cleveland.com/resizer/CbjnPy-8-HkfIl1ApQ431f_Dlh...
Weirdly, hundreds of people were wandering around state capitols with much more dangerous looking weapons, and no cop shot them on site. It's almost like going by "perceived threat" (as determined after the fact by cops) is a giant hole that allows racial bias free reign.
In Rice's case, police were responding to reports of shots fired in the vicinity. By comparison, the protestors in Michigan (presumably this is what you were referring to) were attending a planned protest in a state with legal open carry.
While it's fair to say that bias was a factor in Rice's shooting, and I'd agree, pointing to open carry protests as evidence of this may not be the most effective line of argument. Especially since armed Black demonstrators carried out their own demonstrations not long afterward: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/07/michigan-law...
They were not responding to "reports of shots fired."
Police were responding to:
> "There's a guy in here with a pistol," the man tells a police dispatcher during the call. "It's probably fake, but he's like, pointing it at everybody."
referring to legal open carry, California changed the gun laws after the Back Panthers did the same back in the 60s.
The problem with systematic racism is the "percieved threat" part. When I have that racisit bias, I obviously will percieve a black person more as a threat than a white one. I may not even be aware of it, and facing ones own biases is a hard thing even more so for such serious things as racism and police brutality. When this bias is combined with the kind of training US police is getting, it a given to end up where the US ended up.
The only nice thing is, it also shows where to sart to remedy theissues. Once the police and the poluation accepted to see the issues.
Racial bias is absolutely disgusting. Nothing about the color of a person's skin or their family lineage could ever give indication of the actions they're likely to take. Culture on the other hand, which by definition includes behavior, can be a pretty good indicator. Either way, the room for error grows as the time taken to make a judgement decreases and unfortunately in the situations police find themselves in they have very little time for consideration.
Why should they shift that risk onto the public? Why are they lauded as heroes when they err on the side of killing innocents? Why shouldn't they be the ones to die instead of the people they've miscategorized as threats? Why are their lives worth more?
Seems like one option would be to discard the notion that we should attempt to categorize someone’s ‘culture’ without speaking to them, especially if you are assessing whether or not to use violence against them.
