Thread by @washingtonpost

Last September, The Post published a story about how many women had been fatally shot by police since 2015. At the time, it was nearly 250 women. Now it’s at least 277. #PostForThePress wapo.st/3vASY7V

The story and reporting started when Post reporter and journalism professor @JohnSullivanAU showed grad students The Post’s Fatal Force database, which aims to count every fatal police shooting in the U.S.

Sullivan’s students @marisa_iati and @smbrugal had questions.

According to the data, people killed by police are overwhelmingly male, disproportionately Black and usually armed with a weapon. But @smbrugal and @marisa_iati wanted to know about the women in the database. wapo.st/3eMpGwj

What did the statistics show about women shot and killed by police? Did it suggest other risk factors or possible solutions? The Post hadn't yet written that story, so @marisa_iati and @smbrugal pitched it to editors.

Soon they were analyzing data with researcher @jenjenkinswp, searching for trends and similarities in shootings. Mental illness seemed to be more of a factor when police killed women. And for a while, that’s what the story was about.

And then Breonna Taylor was killed. Taylor, a Black emergency room technician, was killed when police released a hail of gunfire into her Louisville apartment.

Taylor’s death changed the national debate and the story they were writing.

So @marisa_iati, @jenjenkinswp and @smbrugal looked into the specifics of Taylor's death and searched the database for similarities. Another theme emerged: women as collateral damage.

The reporters discovered details about India Kager, a woman who was killed by police in 2015 as police tried to arrest a man in the car with her.

India Kager’s mother expressed appreciation when The Post reached out, saying it was difficult to understand why India’s memory had faded while Breonna Taylor became a household name.

@DreaCornejo and @byaliceli spoke to Kager’s family for this video:

Read the story for yourself and see how Breonna Taylor’s death compares to those of more than 250 women killed by police since 2015. wapo.st/3vASY7V

This is just one story among the thousands published each day by journalists all over the world. We want to hear about a story that left a mark on you. Tweet it using #PostForThePress and help support great journalism like this, today and every day.
subscription.washingtonpost.com/wpfd/?UTM_Prom…