A burglary suspect fleeing police dogs and a helicopter in Florida wades into a dark lake and disappears. Three weeks later his remains are found inside an alligator.
Was he killed by police?
It is an extreme example of the difficulty faced with increasing frequency by data scientists working on a new US government count of deaths in interactions with police – a count that appears likely to soar beyond all previous attempts, now that the issue has reached the highest levels of both protest and power.
As esoteric as the task may seem, the objective is deadly serious: to measure the true dimensions of an epidemic of lethal violence committed by police across the country on often unarmed civilians. A majority of the victims, such as Chicago teenager Laquan McDonald, die in police gunfire. Others, such as the New York father Eric Garner, may die in a banned chokehold or, like the Baltimore 25-year-old Freddie Gray whose death is currently being prosecuted, from injuries in a police vehicle.
At the start of 2015, the Guardian launched The Counted, a public-service project tallying and shedding light on such cases, which has reached a tally of 1,068 so far. Last week, the Federal Bureau of Investigation revealed plans for a similar counting effort, after grossly misrepresenting the problem in eight previous years with annual figures averaging 423.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday December 14 2015, @04:25PM
If the cops had knowingly herded the fool into a pond/swamp/bayou/swamp where they knew an alligator was prowling, then we could claim he died at the hands of the cops. In this case, a criminal was trying to avoid the cops, and of his own free will went into the pond. He falsely believed the pond to be safe, and used the pond as a refuge. The fact that he was taking refuge from the police was irrelevant to the gator, and it should be just as irrelevant to us.