This year, we've seen countless protests over police shootings. Some, like the protests in St. Louis, went on for months.

Recently, activist DeRay Mckesson took to Twitter to post an alarming chart that shows the impact police violence has had on America this year:

The chart comes from the 2017 Police Violence Report conducted by Mapping Police Violence. The report breaks down how many people were killed by police this year, legal action taken against those officers and what led to the interaction in which the people were killed.

The website compiled data from various sources such as media reports, obituaries, public records, and databases. Its authors concluded that the majority of the killings caused by police this year could have been prevented, and the report offers suggestions as to how departments can change their practices in order to avoid more needless deaths.

Here are a couple of the report's key findings that stood out to us:

  • 1,129 people were killed by police in 2017.
  • 92 percent were killed by firearms. Tasers, blunt force and police vehicles accounted for the other deaths. 

The report went on to note that while 170 of those that were killed by police had a knife on them, and 603 had a gun in their possession, many other countries' police forces are trained to disarm people without shooting them. In particular, the report's authors note that the U.K. has a similar number of knife attacks to the U.S., and yet in the United Kingdom, the police handled all of these attacks (besides terror attacks) without firing a single shot.

The report criticized police training procedures in the U.S., pointing out that American officers spend an average of 58 hours in firearms training, but just eight hours in learning to deescalate situations in which they must face an armed individual. 

147 of the people killed by police this year were not armed at all, however. Most of these unarmed people were people of color. 48 were black, 34 were Latinx, 2 were Native American and 2 were Asian American (11 were of unknown race).

Looking at race, the authors found that black people were more likely to be killed by police than other races, but were less likely to be armed and less likely to be threatening the safety of others when they were killed. 

Much of the public's outrage has come after seeing officers kill without facing any consequences. The authors found that it doesn't simply seem that officers are able to kill without facing criminal charges, but that the data back that perception up.

Officers were charged in only 12 of this year's 1,129 killings, which is roughly one percent of all of 2017's police killings. The authors found that in nine of these 12 cases, video existed of the killings, usually dash cam or body cam footage.

At the end of the report, the authors outline ten steps they believe will help to stop police killings in the future. These steps include: ending broken windows policing, ending use of force, ensuring fair police contracts and giving every officer a body cam.

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