U.S. police have shot and killed 385 people during the first five months of this year, a rate of more than two a day, the Washington Post reported Saturday.
The death rate is more than twice that tallied by the federal government over the past decade, a count that officials concede is incomplete.
The analysis is based on data the Post is compiling on every fatal shooting by police in 2015, as well as of every officer killed by gunfire in the line of duty.
"We are never going to reduce the number of police shootings if we don't begin to accurately track this information," said Jim Bueermann, president of the Police Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving law enforcement.
The Post's analysis showed that about half of the victims were white. Among unarmed victims, two-thirds were black or Hispanic.
Based on census numbers for the areas where the killings took place, blacks were killed at three times the rate of whites or of other minorities.