Black Lives Matter

When Wesley Lowery was covering the protests sparked by the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in 2014, his editors were always asking questions.

From his vantage point in Ferguson, Missouri, The Washington Post reporter saw frustration from protesters who insisted Brown's death at the hands of a police officer was not an isolated incident. Police unions insisted these killings were rare. So, editors wanted to know: Who was right?

"But, to our surprise, there was no accurate national data on these killings by police," Lowery told Poynter in an email. "...Several editors, researchers and reporters at The Post began to ask ourselves: If no one else is keeping this data, could we compile it?"

Thus began an ambitious effort from The Washington Post to tally every single individual shot to death by police in the United States throughout the year. Using news reports, public records, Internet databases and original reporting, Lowery and his colleagues determined that fatal police shootings were anything but rare: Nearly 1,000 people were killed by police in 2015. Moreover, their digging revealed that unarmed Black men are seven times as likely as Whites to die by police gunfire.

Why did it take the media so long to realize the extent of the killings? As part of Poynter's ongoing series on social justice journalism leading up to the centennial edition of the Pulitzer Prizes, we asked Lowery how the media came around to covering police shootings as a systemic issue.