MOSCOW (Sputnik) — More than two people have been shot and killed by US law enforcement officials every day since the start of 2015, the Washington Post has found.
"We are never going to reduce the number of police shootings if we don’t begin to accurately track this information," former police chief Jim Bueermann is quoted as saying by the outlet.
Bueermann, who heads the non-governmental organization aiming to improve law enforcement, Police Foundation, believes police shootings in the United States are "grossly underreported."
"There is a compelling social need for this, but a lack of political will to make it happen," Bueermann says.
The Post's investigation found that the racial scope of the shootings was equally divided among whites and minorities. However, when accounted for victims that were unarmed, the analysis found two-thirds of them were African-American or Hispanic.
When further broken down demographically, the data shows the vast majority of shooting victims at the hands of the US police are men between the ages of 25 and 44 armed with lethal weapons.
The outlet found in last month's analysis that out of thousands of police shootings since 2005, only 54 resulted in criminal proceedings.
The end of 2014 and the beginning of 2015 were marked by nationwide protests of police brutality in the US.
Particularly vocal civil unrest broke out over a case in Ferguson, Missouri late last year where the jury did not indict a white officer involved in the fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager.
The latest unrest took place in Ohio a week ago, when Cleveland police arrested 71 people during a day of violent protests after another white officer was acquitted of killing an unarmed black couple in 2012.
