Nationwide, police killed 987 people

COPS ACROSS the country killed nearly 1,000 people last year, including 19 unarmed black males — figures that have remained consistent since 2015.

The data, compiled by the Washington Post from media accounts and public records, was released on Friday. It shows officers last year shot and killed 987 people, about two dozen more than the 963 people fatally shot in 2016.

Of the people killed by cops last year, 735 — or about 75% — were armed, which is nearly identical to the figures from 2015.

The Daily News reported last month that the NYPD recorded 23 clashes in which city cops fired their weapons last year, a record low. Ten of them were fatal. In 2016, NYPD officers were involved in 37 shootings; nine were fatal.

The number of people killed by cops per year in America has stubbornly hovered in the upper 900s since the newspaper began logging data in 2015, when officers shot and killed 995 people.

Though the number of black males — armed and unarmed — involved in such fatal shootings decreased in 2017, they are still shot at disproportionately higher rates than white men.

Black males accounted for 22% of people shot in 2017, but make up only 6% of the nation’s population. White men in 2017 continued to make up the largest group of people killed at the hands of police — 44% of the year’s total.

Mental illness and conditions also played a significant role in last year’s officer-involved shootings, according to the Washington Post.

One in four incidents last year involved a person described to be “in mental distress” when they died. In 88% of those shooting cases, the person was armed.

Overall, the Washington Post has logged a total of 2,945 police shooting deaths over the course of the last three years — a figure they noted differed greatly from the FBI’s.

For the third year in a row, the newspaper’s numbers were nearly double the deadly police shootings recorded annually by the FBI, which vowed to launch a new nationwide data collection system earlier this month.