Journalist focused on racial unrest and police shootings in U.S. reveals hard truths
Grassroots efforts to mitigate police violence against the black community continues to grow in the United States.
The 2014 Ferguson protests in response to the fatal shooting of black teenager Michael Brown by a white police officer has been cited as the beginning of a movement.
Most major American cities have since seen mass police brutality demonstrations — including Baltimore, Cleveland and New York.
Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Akai Gurley and Antonio Martin are among dozens of African Americans whose deaths at the hands of police prompted protests — and demanded public attention.
This sustained confrontation suggests relations between police and black citizens are at a breaking point in the U.S.
But when Wesley Lowery, a reporter with the Washington Post, looked into this critical conflict, he found there was little credible information on a central issue — police shootings.
"At the time, the best real-time database of people getting killed by the police was literally a website called 'killedbypolice.com' which was just a spreadsheet of names drawn from media reports and peoples facebook pictures," says Lowery.
With the Washington Post, Lowery prompted an initiative to track fatal police shootings. In only three years, they have documented more than twice the amount of police shootings than the FBI reported were occuring.
We found that yes, there are major racial disparities in who's being killed by the police... we also found that a quarter of the people killed by police are mentally ill or in the midst of a mental crisis when they're killed.- Wesley Lowery
On The Current, Lowery reveals the hard truths to emerge from the data, and other challenging experiences he faced in covering American racial tensions and writing his new book They Can't Kill Us All.
Listen to the full conversation at the top of this post.
This segment was produced by The Current's Howard Goldenthal.