US POLICE killed 1,068 people in the 12 months from George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis on May 25 2020, Mapping Police Violence has reported.

The US campaign group said the figure equates to three killings a day. There have only been six days so far in 2021 where nobody has been killed by a US police officer, it added.

The number is similar to all recent years in the US, despite Mr Floyd’s murder and the killings of other police victims such as paramedic Breonna Taylor, shot dead by officers who raided her home at night, sparking the huge Black Lives Matter movement against police violence. 

US cities including Minneapolis and St Louis, where Taylor was killed, have passed some reforms to police methods including restrictions on no-knock warrants and bans on firing at moving vehicles.

The group said black people were three times more likely to be killed by police than white people. They are also more likely to be unarmed when killed.

It found no correlation between violent crime rates and the number of police killings in different cities, and very low accountability, with 98.3 per cent of police killings between 2013 and 2020 not resulting in any officers being charged and just 0.4 per cent ending with an officer’s conviction.

Levels of police violence in the US are unique in the developed world, though some third world countries such as Brazil and the Philippines record even higher numbers of deaths.