prison for the unnecessary illegal killings of innocent people. the goal is to stop the police killings of innocent people in the first place. and if those people s lives mattered last summer, then they matter now. and until we actually change this and keep up with the overall evidence, wait for the moments arbitrarily caught on tape. but you can t fix a problem like this in moments or hours. we re dealing with a problem of years, centuries. stories do help people see reality. but the reality is unfolding in years and years of government conduct and most of it is not on tape. so you have to go back to the steady line. it s on the same pace this year. this is not a time for told you
against police instead of the d.a.s that are usually on the police s team. there s also a plan that police unions are fighting hardest to stop, which is to reform the legal immunity that prevents courts from ever finding facts in the first place. right now, under the law, most cases against police are actually tossed before getting to a trial because of this type of immunity. the alleged victims don t get a day in court. if caught in alleged his conduct, like the colorado police handcuffing and detaining unarmed women and children at gunpoint, unarmed in broad daylight. it was very hard to see why those kids would pose that kind of threat, and the question legally becomes, is there accountability for that conduct?
police. so that s the same as last year. if we want to change this, which a lot of people and companies claim they did last year, then, again, my job here as a newscaster pretty simple. i can report to you by definition, as a policy, we would to do more than we did the last year because this whole thing is holding steady and most of what we covered in this report tonight focuses on the category of police killings. that s this chart. keep in mind, there s the even more common issue of extensive and allegedly excessive use of police force in america. our police officers sent over 50,000 people a year to the e.r. on average, half a million visits since 2015 according to a cdc count. i told you at the beginning of this, we were just going to go through the evidence and the facts. that s all this is. this is what s going on. these stories grind on whether
this year and that chart shows. now, an observer might have thought or hoped that a year like the one we just lived through would impact some officers conduct. when it comes to shootings in the aggregate, it did not. second, some valid policy reports are also failing to bend that curve. whether we like that or not, we should show the evidence. the body cameras can add to the type of mechanisms that law enforcement oversight needs but in this past year, they re not reducing shootings. tonight, in fact, among some of the few examples we chose out of the many available, we saw stories of police just unilaterally turned off their body cameras. now, part of my job on the news is to just be straightforward. have you ever seen surveillance video at a bank which could just be flipped off by any visitor or bank robber? that would kind of defeat the point. so when videos do incriminate the police, what happens? even when they exist,
needs to know in america right now. that after all that protest and pressure and heat and scrutiny and video evidence and even that murder conviction i just showed you, take it all together, it s not even budging the rate that police use lethal force. as these killings around police departments themselves, don t claim that they are all okay with all these use of force. in fact, we have, even since last year, documented situations in which they admit mistakes and put out statements with the loss of life and typically pose investigation and prosecution of the officers who created that situation. and i want to tell you something else. the protests have certainly gotten people s attention. most americans are aware police violence is a serious problem. that consensus has grown. it s even stronger than a few years ago. but numbers, which are part of evidence, also only tell part of the story. because when you look at that chart of the killings each year,