Where Police Killings Often Meet With Silence: Rural America

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

53% : Kentucky's 740 troopers police rural communities and assist local law enforcement in what he called "volatile cases"
52% : About 55 percent of households in the state have guns, according to estimates from the RAND Corporation, which ranks Kentucky 12th for gun ownership.
48% : John Casey had a long history of run-ins with law enforcement and had been known to carry guns, according to police records.
44% : This article was reported and written by The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization focusing on criminal justice issues, and the nonprofit Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting.
44% : White people make up the rural majority in nearly every state, and two-thirds of the people fatally shot by law enforcement in rural areas across the country were white, the data analysis shows; about 10 percent were Black.
44% : The Post's data does not include names of law enforcement agencies.
43% : After a police officer in Ferguson, Mo., shot and killed Michael Brown in 2014, the federal government began pushing law enforcement agencies to adopt body cameras to improve accountability.
39% : High-profile urban police shootings such as the killing of Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Ky., have set off protests, prompted widespread calls for change and led to new policies in some law enforcement agencies.
38% : Working alone "affects the mind-set of the officer on the scene," said Ralph Weisheit, a professor of criminal justice at Illinois State University who has studied rural policing.
33% : And in at least nine of the 33 rural Kentucky deaths during the period reviewed, troopers fatally shot someone who had fired at law enforcement.
33% : The findings include at least six deaths in which officers from other law enforcement agencies also fired weapons, and it is unclear which bullets were fatal.

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