Talk:Lists of killings by law enforcement officers in the United States

Extreme incompleteness compared to The Washington Post
The Washington Post has a database of all killings by U.S. police at https://github.com/washingtonpost/data-police-shootings/blob/master/fatal-police-shootings-data.csv.


 * For 2015, Wikipedia lists 845, The Washington Post lists 991.
 * For 2016, Wikipedia lists 181, The Washington Post lists 963.
 * For 2017, Wikipedia lists 53, The Washington Post lists 508.

If there is an objective of completeness, Wikipedia is falling behind. —Anomalocaris (talk) 22:12, 6 July 2017 (UTC)
 * I agree. I came here to get an idea of how many people were killed by police every year, then compared with Police use of deadly force in the United States and saw how incomplete it is. There should be a more obvious disclaimer at the top of the article. The plain text is not enough. Do we have a banner for that? MonsieurD (talk) 13:07, 8 June 2020 (UTC)
 * See: Dynamic a-list We'd love to have your help! It's like a full time job keeping these lists updated. I did it for a few months in 2012 but I haven't had time since then. -Michellecornelison (talk) 01:53, 11 March 2021 (UTC)

Why are there so many missing killings by Police from these lists?
if you look at, https://github.com/washingtonpost/data-police-shootings, there is about 1000 killings per year, and there is already 15 killings in 2019.... — Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.174.8.21 (talk) 18:12, 10 January 2019 (UTC)
 * See: Dynamic a-list We'd love to have your help! It's like a full time job keeping these lists updated. I did it for a few months in 2012 but I haven't had time since then. -Michellecornelison (talk) 01:53, 11 March 2021 (UTC)

Hunter Brittain
I recently created an article for the Killing of Hunter Brittain. Any help improving it would be appreciated. Thank you, — Preceding unsigned comment added by Thriley (talk • contribs) 21:57, 29 June 2021 (UTC)

Unsure these lists are encyclopedic
Hi. I'm unsure these lists are encyclopedic. Taking a random example, List of killings by law enforcement officers in the United States, February 2022, only one of the entries is notable enough to have an associated dedicated Wikipedia article (Killing of Amir Locke). The lists themselves seem to be synthesis of news coverage, which isn't within Wikipedia's role as a general-purpose encyclopedia. In some cases we don't even know the deceased's name, which raises very deep notability concerns for a project like Wikipedia.

This has been brought up before, but I think it needs a fresh discussion. I'm not quite ready to nominate these pages for deletion, but merging them and only listing sufficiently notable killings by law enforcement is probably better than these incomplete lists for Wikipedia's purpose. Other databases such as those maintained by news outlets will, of course, be more comprehensive, and that's just fine. --MZMcBride (talk) 17:39, 1 February 2023 (UTC)
 * I redirected one article so far with this edit. I'll continue unless there are objections. --MZMcBride (talk) 19:13, 7 February 2023 (UTC)


 * You make a valid point, and I am inclined to agree with you. When I started the list in Oct 2011, no other publications were attempting to create a comprehensive list. At the time the FBI was estimating 400 law enforcement killings of civilians per year. I was hoping that a mass of Wikipedia editors would rise to the occasion and create a comprehensive list. I worked at it until Feb 2013 and did receive help periodically, but there was never enough effort to keep up. I was very pleased when I learned that the Washington Post had taken up the task through their own publication. And they have done it well.


 * On the one hand it seems a shame for those countless hours of effort by many editors over 12 years to simply disappear. On the other hand, I do understand how the incomplete lists are causing confusion. And they are not really adding value beyond the Washington Post’s list. Is there a way to deemphasize the existing lists without deleting them? LUOF (talk) 20:30, 7 February 2023 (UTC)
 * Okay, I'll object. (I've also reverted the redirect, restoring the content of List of killings by law enforcement officers in the United States, January 2010.)  I looked at the pre-redirect version, starting at the first entry, which was enough for me to decide to revert.  The death of Aaron Campbell was notable enough; he was not just another black man shot in the back while moving away from police.  That unjustified execution by the government without charging or dismissal of the government's agent was very much a notable incident.  In fact it was also a significant factor leading to United States v. City of Portland.  Items like this deserve mention in an encyclopedia.  (Maybe not in a paper encyclopedia limited to a few tens of volumes, but that's not Wikipedia.)
 * Further, none of these entries are sufficiently notable for standalone articles is a rather radical justification, as probably a majority of existing "List of" articles would fail that test and thus would be subject to deletion. The fact that not every list entry has a standalone article (or perhaps just deserves one by notability) is not a reason to delete the list (IMO).
 * I think there's a lot encyclopedic information presented in many of the entries of these lists constructed by editors over the years, and those lists should not be dropped so effortlessly. -- R. S. Shaw (talk) 08:32, 8 February 2023 (UTC)
 * I don't particularly have an opinion on the outcome of this particular discussion, but I will note that lists such as these are often created because the individual members are not notable in and of themselves, but the topic as a whole is worth recording (e.g. List of unnumbered trans-Neptunian objects or the various List of NGC objects pages). Primefac (talk) 10:03, 8 February 2023 (UTC)
 * Hi R. S. Shaw. What's radical? Wikipedia has pretty strict notability requirements for inclusion here. We don't cover every news story, whether it's a murder, a kidnapping, a robbery, a rape, etc. We have a pretty high bar, as a general-purpose encyclopedia, for covering only sufficiently notable crimes.
 * Whether or not the subject has a dedicated article is a decent proxy for whether they are sufficiently notable to be mentioned. For example, this is the standard we use with Deaths in 2023-type articles. We don't list every death in 2023, even ones that have an associated obituary or news article. That isn't our standard for inclusion here and never has been.
 * Specific cases, such as the one you mention, may warrant additional coverage, but they are the exception in these lists, not the rule. Most of these entries are citing one news article that discusses the death. A single news story is not sufficient for inclusion in a project like Wikipedia. Other projects that specifically document every death by police would of course include entries like these, but Wikipedia is not that project. --MZMcBride (talk) 18:00, 8 February 2023 (UTC)
 * The notability issue came up when the lists were first being created in 2011 and some editors were wanting to delete the entire topic. The moderator deemed that while individual entries did not meet the notability criteria to justify a stand-alone article, the lists themselves were sufficiently notable. This did not come up at the time, but to require every entry in a list to be individually notable would be analogous to requiring every paragraph in an article to be notable. Of course that is not the requirement because the individual paragraphs support the article as a whole, which itself should be notable.
 * While the Washington Post database has tremendous value and is much closer to being comprehensive, the entries in these lists provide a narrative context that is often missing from the data in the WaPo database.
 * So, while the incompleteness of the lists does cause some confusion, I too object to them being dropped. LUOF (talk) 00:48, 9 February 2023 (UTC)
 * Some of these incidents are very much notable and having coverage of them on Wikipedia makes sense. I'm not objecting to articles such as Killing of Tamir Rice. We can and should have coverage of that killing in a general-purpose encyclopedia.
 * But a core and longstanding policy of Wikipedia is that it is not a newspaper. If you skim that policy page, you can see other bits that apply to lists such as List of killings by law enforcement officers in the United States, November 2014 as well. For example the part about how the John Smith disambiguation is not intended to list every person named John Smith, just the notable ones. We deliberately exclude verifiable information all the time, for example most restaurants do not have articles here. And as I said above, we don't document every rape or robbery or murder. That's by design, since Wikipedia is not a directory in the same way that other sites are. There are places that would welcome documentation for every killing by law enforcement officers in the U.S., however that's not Wikipedia's role.
 * Entries such as Christopher Anderson in the November 2014 article do not appear to meet Wikipedia's notability criteria. --MZMcBride (talk) 05:35, 9 February 2023 (UTC)

The lead paragraph of List of cases of police brutality by date says it lists cases that "attracted significant media or historical attention." I'm asking for the same standard to be applied to these lists. --MZMcBride (talk) 05:45, 9 February 2023 (UTC)


 * MZMcBride, can you please point to the section of Wikipedia policy that requires every entry in a list to be sufficiently notable to merit its own article? If editors were creating new articles for each of the incidents that are concerning you, then I would agree that they do not merit an article. But that is not the case. Wikipedia is filled with articles that include lists of information that themselves do not merit an entire article. To take just one random example, the M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System article, about half way down, lists variants of M270, M270A1, M270B1, M270C1, etc. Each variants gets a short description that is about the same size as an entry in the lists of killings by law enforcement. Certainly no one is claiming that those variants should be removed from the article because they do not merit their own page. It is similar for individual entries in the lists of killings by law enforcement. As a group, they are notable. LUOF (talk)

Personally I strongly support these pages and feel these lists are very much in line with what "the type of encyclopedia" Wikipedia functions as, being an encyclopedia of police deaths (just as if you were to get a paper encyclopedia on the topic, or any other specialized topic). The fact that the subject matter is events rather than say, an encyclopedia covering the radioactive decay and other immutable properties of various isotopes does not make it non-encyclopedic or "like a newspaper" (in my opinion). Many subjects are not notable enough to justify an entire article - that's okay, that's why they're here in this list. While I appreciate the Washington Post's own list, it is a largely automated system lacking many of the details that wikipedians provide, and I don't feel that another source of information on this topic should have any weight or bearing to this page's existence whatsoever. At the same time, simply because it is incomplete does not justify deletion. Many articles on wikipedia are "incomplete" - in fact, the vast majority of them are. I don't believe the spirit of Wikipedia has ever been to delete things just because they require more work. A MINOTAUR (talk) 15:48, 15 August 2023 (UTC)

Chart change?
Ummmmmmmmm… maybe rethink the chart design? 🤨 — Preceding unsigned comment added by Synetech (talk • contribs) 04:23, 13 January 2024 (UTC)
 * I assume you mean File:Annual fatal police shootings per million residents. US versus European countries.png, which was taken from a published article. The weird smile thing is a bit odd, but it's transcluded from Police use of deadly force in the United States so any change will have to be made there. Primefac (talk) 08:28, 13 January 2024 (UTC)