via The Guardian UK embarrasses All US Media but will we notice?.
WED JUN 03, 2015 by johnnyintexas
The Guardian UK has decided to keep a running total of ALL people killed by police in 2015, and keep a live running total that you can check on their website.
They break it down demographically and by state to make it easy to see what is happening in this nation.
It’s even interactive. You can give them info, that they might not have been given by local agencies where you live.
Can you imagine any entity in our so called free press doing something like this?
I can’t, because nothing has stood in the way of any newspaper or network and prevented them from doing the same thing. Yet until The Guardian did, we’ve been told that the Federal government doesn’t keep track of this, local and state governments don’t coordinate the data and as a result doing it was impossible for any American media to accomplish.
That they are doing so has been referenced in another diary as a source of data, but the focus of that diary was a specific set of data in a companion project covering police killings from 2012-2015.
It wasn’t focused on what an incredible undertaking this is by a foreign media outlet to give Americans news that our own media has never tried to give us and until recently basically claimed it was impossible to accomplish since there are no central reporting structures to ask.
The fact that this data was so available to anyone asking that a British paper published it without turning over heaven and earth really should embarrass our own media, all of it. Even our most Liberal entities never have seemed to gather themselves up to do the same thing.
I think Kudos are in order for The Guardian.
They proved a point I believe to be truer than ever which is if you want honest reporting on what is happening in the USA, you need to read foreign news outlets. Who instead are report on events here like our media seems to relish reporting on events elsewhere (because things are so peachy keen in the USA).
Of course, I don’t expect anyone in our media will be embarrassed.
Instead they will utterly ignore this, and hope by doing so so few Americans realize what’s being done by a foreign media outlet to inform them, that it will fail to gain traction and be forgotten once they are done.
At the very least we should spread the word and encourage anyone who doesn’t know about what The Guardian is doing to visit and learn the details that up to now our own media all of them said was beyond their abilities to obtain.
The link below will take you directly to the map along with the running count. While you visit, you can find the other half of the project detailing police killings from 2012 up to the beginning of 2015.
Filed under: human rights & social justice, justice & law, law & criminal justice, law enforcement, media, print Tagged: media, police killings in us, print media, The Guardian
