Prior to Ferguson, nobody was collecting data on police shootings across the US. Now the press and some nonprofits collect it. The Washington Post has a database.[1] The Guardian has another one.[2] There's a site, "fatalencounters.org", trying to crowdsource this.[3]
> When Talking Points Memo, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post needed data on how often police officers are charged with on-duty killings, they all turned to the same guy: Bowling Green State University criminologist Philip M. Stinson.
> Stinson, 50, has become an indispensable source for researchers and reporters looking into alleged crimes and acts of violence by police officers because he has built a database tracking thousands of incidents in which officers were arrested since 2005. His data has shown that even the few police officers who are arrested for drunken driving are rarely convicted and that arrests spike for cops who have been on the force 18 years or longer, contrary to prior research showing it was mostly new officers who were acting out.
> The whole data-collecting operation is powered by 48 Google Alerts that Stinson set up in 2005, along with individual Google Alerts for each of nearly 6,000 arrests of officers. He has set up 10 Gmail addresses to collect all the alert emails, which feed articles into a database that also contains court records and videos.
> The Ferguson unrest (also referred to just as Ferguson) involves protests and riots that began the day after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown by white police officer Darren Wilson on August 9, 2014
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http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/an-ex-cop-keeps-the-coun...
> When Talking Points Memo, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post needed data on how often police officers are charged with on-duty killings, they all turned to the same guy: Bowling Green State University criminologist Philip M. Stinson.
> Stinson, 50, has become an indispensable source for researchers and reporters looking into alleged crimes and acts of violence by police officers because he has built a database tracking thousands of incidents in which officers were arrested since 2005. His data has shown that even the few police officers who are arrested for drunken driving are rarely convicted and that arrests spike for cops who have been on the force 18 years or longer, contrary to prior research showing it was mostly new officers who were acting out.
> The whole data-collecting operation is powered by 48 Google Alerts that Stinson set up in 2005, along with individual Google Alerts for each of nearly 6,000 arrests of officers. He has set up 10 Gmail addresses to collect all the alert emails, which feed articles into a database that also contains court records and videos.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferguson_unrest
> The Ferguson unrest (also referred to just as Ferguson) involves protests and riots that began the day after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown by white police officer Darren Wilson on August 9, 2014