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After the death of George Floyd, and the massive international movement to defund and demilitarize police, we got to work trying to see the Canadian context. Today, that project goes live.
There is no central database of police violence or killings in Canada. In 2018 we set out to build our own, and we launched Deadly Force, a database of everyone killed by police since Jan. 1, 2000.
Today, we launched its updated version: https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/fatalpoliceencounters/
Today, we launched its updated version: https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/fatalpoliceencounters/
555 people have been killed by police in Canada since Jan. 1, 2000. We’ve told the story before of how Black and Indigenous people are over-represented in that data. That hasn’t changed in this update.
But overall, the numbers are increasing. More people are dying at the hands of police in Canada.
2016 set a record for most people killed by police, at 40 deaths. So far in 2020 we already have 30 people killed. This sets 2020 on track to be the deadliest year since we started tracking this data.
A huge number of people come together to make this project a reality, to gather this data, and to make it public. Their work is important.
But to have a public discussion about the role of police, the role of violence in policing, we have to have a clear view of where we are and the reality on the ground. That doesn’t exist in Canada. So we went and built it. https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/fatalpoliceencounters/
Click on each image and you can see the profile built by our team of researchers to identify the context of their deaths. These are their stories beyond the raw numbers.
