If you've been following the news in recent months, you've seen a parade of stories in which unarmed men, usually but not always black, had calamitous encounters with police. In just the past two weeks, there was: an indictment in the shooting of a 68-year-old grandfather in his driveway; a motorist shot and injured as he tried to comply with an officer's request for his ID; and a drug suspect beaten with police officers' guns as he tried to surrender. It's become its own grim, politically polarizing genre of news story.
Are we seeing more of these stories because they're actually happening more? As we've written before, it's pretty hard to tell just how often police officers use deadly force. There are thousands and thousands of law enforcement agencies in the United States. Many report their use-of-force data, while others don't, and different agencies have different standards for when force is justified. As best as the Department of Justice can guess, there are about 400 police-related deaths each year across the nation. In a nation that sees millions of civilian- police encounters each year, that means such deaths are exceedingly rare. But you could look at it another way: 400 deaths a year means that every day, someone in the United States is probably killed in an encounter with police. That's a lot of potential grist for this genre.
It's clear that video has played a role in the fresh media attention ā the most high-profile of these incidents was caught on either a cellphone camera or a police dashboard camera, or by surveillance footage.
[For more of this story, written by Gene Demby, go to http://www.npr.org/blogs/codes...grab-media-spotlight]
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