TASK:

This project analyzes data from all fatal police shootings and all police officer deaths in the United States from 2015 and 2016. Particular attention is placed on the race of the victims in order to ascertain whether any groups were disproportionately affected. Comparisons are drawn between the odds of being killed in a police fatality as an officer and as an ordinary citizen.
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DATA:

1) The Counted is a project by the Guardian – and you – working to count the number of people killed by police and other law enforcement agencies in the United States throughout 2015 and 2016, to monitor their demographics and to tell the stories of how they died.

The database will combine Guardian reporting with verified crowdsourced information to build a more comprehensive record of such fatalities. The Counted is the most thorough public accounting for deadly use of force in the US, but it will operate as an imperfect work in progress – and will be updated by Guardian reporters and interactive journalists frequently.

Any deaths arising directly from encounters with law enforcement will be included in the database. This will inevitably include, but will likely not be limited to, people who were shot, tasered and struck by police vehicles as well those who died in police custody. Self-inflicted deaths during encounters with law enforcement or in police custody or detention facilities will not be included.

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 in August 2014. The Guardian agrees with those analysts, campaign groups, activists and authorities who argue that such accounting is a prerequisite for an informed public discussion about the use of force by police.

2) This dataset contains data behind the story, The Dallas Shooting Was Among The Deadliest For Police In U.S. History. The data are scraped from ODMP and capture information on all tracked on-duty police officer deaths in the U.S. broken down by cause from 1971 until 2016.

Data from the 2010 Census was used to estimate the proportion of the population.
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RESOURCES:
1) http://www.theguardian.com/thecounted
2) https://github.com/fivethirtyeight/data/tree/master/police-deaths