Vermont Only State With Zero Police Kills in 2015
Vermont is currently the only state where zero people have been killed by police in 2015, according to The Guardian‘s police violence database“The Counted.”
Zero people had been killed by police this year in South Dakota, Rhode Island, and Vermont before September. But The Guardian reports that Richard Cosentino of Rhode Island and Curtis Meyer, Rory Gunderman, and Patrick Lundstrom of South Dakota all had fatal encounters with law enforcement.
Gunderman was white, Lundstrom was of unspecified Native American/American Indian ethnicity, and Cosentino and Meyer’s races/ethnicities are listed as “unknown.” All four were men. Meyer and Gunderman were armed with guns, authorities said, and Lundstrom was reportedly armed with a “blunt object.” Cosentino died unarmed in police custody.
“The Counted” tracks the number of people killed by police in the United States and breaks down each killing by a variety of demographics. The Guardian launched its database because the U.S. government maintains no such comprehensive database—a fact brought to light by the#BlackLivesMatter and Black Lives Matter activism that followedMichael Brown’s fatal shooting by Ferguson, Mo. police officer Darren Wilson, and Eric Garner’s killing in Staten Island, N.Y.
The Guardian is not the only organization to launch a database tracking police-related deaths in 2015. The Washington Post maintains a similar database that only records the number of people shot by police, and Samuel Sinyangwe, Johnetta Elzie, and DeRay Mckesson maintainMapping Police Violence, where they issue monthly reports detailing the number of black people killed by authorities in the U.S.
by John Walker for fusion.net
