Talk:List of killings by law enforcement officers in the United States, April 2015

This article was nominated for deletion on 20 April 2015. The result of the discussion was keep.

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El Paso shooting[edit]

El Paso had one a couple of days ago, — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.167.55.114 (talk) 04:49, 2 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the pointer, added. --ProtectorServant (talk) 14:21, 2 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

NPOV[edit]

Due to the AfD I have added a NPOV tag, the issue seems to be casting law enforcement on this list in a bad light. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 00:53, 21 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I think that the issue should not be what light law enforcement is placed in, but whether the list is accurate. People are intelligent enough to decide for themselves what light is shown. Michael Stern 02:18, 21 April 2015 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2602:306:8B4F:D6B0:F94D:3A9D:6E46:8D68 (talk) [reply]

It needs cleaning up is the bottom line, I am open to any improvements here. -Knowledgekid87 (talk) 01:25, 21 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Behavior of law enforcement personnel is an important issue. Perhaps the list needs to be reviewed for accurate status - for example, whether an investigation is ongoing or there has been a legal determination that law enforcement personnel are responsible for a person's death. Could this list be re-titled as list of media accusations / pending investigations? (This is my 1st Wikipedia post.) Quester4Truth (talk) 02:32, 21 April 2015 (UTC)Quester4Truth[reply]

This is an important list to have, especially because we don't actually know how many people are being killed by police, even though it's an important issue in public dialog and in building an orderly society. An article here explains the issue and links to a recent report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics. In summary, prior estimates indicated that police in the United States kill 1-2 people on an average day; the new estimates indicate the actual figure is 2-3 times that. This list doesn't try to do original research replacing those statistics, but exposes the individual names and stories as they have been reported in the media. This list also does a much better job than many others on Wikipedia in terms of citing sources, I think it's better at that than most other lists and think the tag should be removed quickly.

The reason "alleged" appears next to what the people who have been killed allegedly did is because it is an allegation, and might not be true. While even a false accusation, alone, can be (in practice) sufficient to justify shooting the person, once they are dead there is much less reason to expend public resources in a fair investigation of what crimes they may or may not have committed, because they've already received the death penalty and are unlikely to be further tried in a court of law.

As was noted in the deletion discussion, this article can help cast law enforcement in a *better* light than much of the media coverage out there, by putting the killings that might seem clearly unjustified (which the media clearly like to focus on) in equal standing (a row in the table) with others. Some of the most controversial ones get their own pages, linked to in these lists, but here each person killed gets a row in the table. ProtectorServant (talk) 12:41, 22 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

The edit battle over the 1-year old baby killed by people who are not police is not relevant to this discussion nor to its potential deletion. That is simply a normal issue of removing content that is outside the scope of the list, as framed at the top of the page. ProtectorServant (talk) 13:07, 22 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

People are using Wikipedia as a spittoon for their political agendas. Is there a corresponding list of police killed by civilians? Perhaps all civilians would like to be tarred by those lists just as these lists tacitly paint all police officers as violent, racist and incompetent. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 220.244.35.123 (talk) 12:31, 23 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia does have such lists. See:

The last list there, most relevant to this conversation, is very long with most details coming from a single source (which may be itself quite biased).

Those lists don't even include explicit disclaimers like this one, which says "The listing documents the occurrence of a death, making no implications regarding either wrongdoing or justification on the part of the person killed or the officer involved." That's good for neutrality, because if we were trying to make editorial decisions (e.g. "list of justified killings by police" or "list of unjustified killings by police") *that* would be an NPOV issue.

Killings of civilians by police are clearly an issue that people want to talk about and are talking about, and ought to be able to get facts in order to have an informed discussion, which is the role of an encyclopedia. If people just look at media sources, they're going to get a very different picture, that focuses on shootings people are more likely to see as unjustified, and does not give much coverage to the others. Without a publicly accessible list that gives each person killed their own row, the conclusion of public debate (if based just on the current media environment) may well be overly severe restrictions or prohibitions on authorized use of deadly force by law enforcement. While public debate should decide what's appropriate, this set of lists should just inform that discussion with information about what's happening. ProtectorServant (talk) 13:32, 23 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Also, this list does not "tacitly paint all police officers as violent, racist and incompetent." Especially among the several I've added to these lists recently, at least some are clearly justified and have even been officially determined to be justified, and in a larger number investigations are still ongoing. There are clearly competent officers out there acting appropriately. There are also some that aren't, and the fact that no profession of this size can have 100% of its people doing the right thing 100% of the time should not surprise anyone. The encyclopedia should report a summary of facts and link (or more than one link) to an original article. ProtectorServant (talk) 14:41, 25 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Unnamed Individuals[edit]

Just decided to ask a question (if anyone knows). Many of the individuals are unidentified. Will that be updated at a later date? I understand some of the names may not be released, but I noticed a lot more than I would have expected were unnamed. Mrobviousjosh (talk) 06:13, 28 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Often, the individuals' names are not immediately released, but do get released after a few days. As you can see, there are a lot of cases where nobody goes back through the list to find those names and update the table. If you can find verifiable sources to update these stories with the names, please do! Please then add the new sources in a new <ref>...</ref>. --ProtectorServant (talk) 13:15, 29 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Linking of cities[edit]

The cities are currently not linked. Is there any reason for this? It seems like it could be handy for users. Any thoughts about this? KConWiki (talk) 01:16, 29 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, that seems like it would be a helpful contribution and make it a better article! I think the main reason it hasn't happened is just that nobody's taken the time to do it yet. If you're willing to add those links in, please do! --ProtectorServant (talk) 13:17, 29 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

OK - This page has the cities all linked, let's see how it goes. We can work through other pages as opportunities allow. KConWiki (talk) 02:30, 30 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks! I (and other contributors) may not always have time to check for the right Wikipedia city page to link to in future additions at the time of those additions, but having another editor come through and add those wikilinks is helpful in improving the article. --ProtectorServant (talk) 14:06, 30 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]