In his opinion column, “Defund the police,” Jay Fleitman minimizes police violence using data selectively culled from the (snarkily referred to) Washington Post database. The problem is that data only is a shooting database. It does not include George Floyd, nor Eric Garner, both of whom were killed without a gun.
There are other databases that are more comprehensive that give a truer picture of the situation, such as mappingpoliceviolence.org.
Peter Gutierrez
Amherst