Open thread for night owls: Washington Post and Guardian report killings by cops very differently

Jim Naureckas at Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting writes—WaPo Tallies Police Killings–but Holds Back Some of the Numbers That Count:

Concerned that official records undercount the number of people shot and killed by police in the United States every year, the Washington Post(12/26/15) attempted to compile a list of every fatal police shooting in 2015. The paper found nearly a thousand such cases—more than twice as many as the FBI reports in a typical year.

The Post‘s project—which corroborates a similar tally conducted by the British Guardian (6/9/15)—is a journalistic accomplishment, as well as an achievement of the Black Lives Matter movement, which has worked to call attention to police violence in the wake of the killing of Michael Brown by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014.

But it’s hard for me to escape the feeling that the Post story—by Kimberly Kindy and Marc Fisher—was framed by the paper to minimize the project’s remarkable findings. Take the first paragraph that summarizes details of the results:

In a year-long study, the Washington Post found that the kind of incidents that have ignited protests in many US communities—most often, white police officers killing unarmed black men—represent less than 4 percent of fatal police shootings. Meanwhile, the Post found that the great majority of people who died at the hands of the police fit at least one of three categories: They were wielding weapons, they were suicidal or mentally troubled, or they ran when officers told them to halt.

“The kind of incidents that have ignited protests…represent less than 4 percent of fatal police shootings”: That sure sounds like an attempt to play down the number, doesn’t it? Particularly since the write-up never presents the raw number for fatal police shootings of unarmed African-Americans in 2015—which is 37—or the more comprehensive number of all unarmed civilians shot and killed: 90. Those numbers can be found on a graphic that accompanied the story in the paper’s print edition, and in an interactive feature online–but are nowhere to be found in the Post‘s own article on its project. (“Just 9 percent of shootings involved an unarmed victim,” a sidebar accompanying the graphic began—that word “just” indicating that we should read that as “not so many.”) [...]

The Post‘s delicate approach to police killings can be appreciated by comparison with the Guardian‘s similar project. For one thing, the Guardian contrasts the numbers with statistics on police killings in Europe, so you can see that the rate at which US cops kill people is far out of line with the frequency of such deaths in comparable countries. For example, England and Wales had 55 fatal police shootings in the last 24 years, while the US had 59 in just 24 days. (The higher level of crime in the US explains some but not much of this difference; the US murder rate is about four times the UK’s, but has a rate of police killings about 70 times as high.) [...]

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At Daily Kos on this date in 2012—Poor in Georgia? Don't expect anything but humiliation from the state:

The fact that today, just 27 percent of Americans who are poor enough to qualify for cash benefits under Temporary Assistance to Needy Families actually receive those benefits is one of the great successes of welfare reform, if you measure success by the "get everyone off of welfare at whatever cost to their health and well-being" standards the reformers intended. And by that measure, Georgia is amazing: Less than 7 percent of Georgia families living in poverty receive TANF, Slate's Neil deMause reports.

In 2004, the state hired a new Department of Human Services commissioner whose overriding goal was to get people off of welfare. Not to make them not need it, just to keep them from receiving it. (Again, in the spirit of welfare reform.) Under her leadership, 60 percent of those who had been receiving benefits—a number that had already plunged in the immediate wake of welfare reform—dropped out of the program, and the percentage of applications approved dropped from 40 percent to 20 percent. Today, Georgia receives $330 million a year from the federal government for TANF, but it doesn't go to TANF.

On today’s Kagro in the Morning show, we were back with a live show, catching up on items of varying importance. Greg Dworkin updated the 2016 news. Paul Ryan tried to govern, so the loons are mad. GunFAIL continued apace. Speaking of which, air ambulances cost big bucks! Often!

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