On June 1, The Guardian launched a new site: The Counted.

The US government has no comprehensive record of the number of people killed by law enforcement. This lack of basic data has been glaring amid the protests, riots and worldwide debate set in motion by the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old, in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014…

The FBI runs a voluntary program through which law enforcement agencies may or may not choose to submit their annual count of “justifiable homicides”, which it defines as “the killing of a felon in the line of duty”.

This system is arguably less valuable than having no system at all: fluctuations in the number of agencies choosing to report figures, plus faulty reporting by agencies that do report, have resulted in partially informed news coverage pointing misleadingly to trends that may or may not exist.

You really must go to the site and see it for yourself. Powerful. Painful. Tragic. All.

More like it…

Check out this episode of On the Media for more about this effort, why it is happening, and how they are doing it. It is very good. The segment after it about race in reporting is even better.