Visualization: Police-Involved Homicides in the U.S. Since 2011

Produced by San Diego design firm 1 Point 21, this visualization shows all 2,695 verifiable officer-involved homicide nationwide since 2011 that were reported to and cataloged by the crowdsourced database Fatal Encounters. Mouseover any line to view incident information at top. The red button showing incident classification links directly the original news article. Data can be sorted by year, race and manner of death. Scroll down to see racial breakdowns and statewide data.

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It's a headline that's become alarmingly familiar.

An unarmed black man was shot dead by a white police officer in North Charleston, S.C. last weekend. On Tuesday, the officer, Michael Slager, 33, was charged with murder after the release of a bystander's cellphone video showing him repeatedly shooting Walter Scott, 50, in the back while he ran away from a traffic stop.

Slager initially claimed he fired shots when Scott grabbed his Taser and ran. But the footage suggests otherwise: the officer appears to place his Taser next to Scott's body after shooting him.

Slager was charged with murder Tuesday following the video's release.

The case comes on the heels of several other recent high profile incidents of white police officers killing unarmed black men, including the 2014 deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson and Eric Garner in New York. Like them, Scott's death has ignited deep racial tensions and heightened public scrutiny nationwide of violent police behavior.

The incidents have also brought sharp focus on the lack of comprehensive national data on officer-involved shootings. As The Lowdown reported in January, FBI police-related homicide figures are woefully incomplete, in large part because reporting of this information by local police agencies is completed on an entirely voluntary basis.

In the absence of such data, a handful of independent crowdsourced sites have attempted to keep better track of officer-involved homicides, cataloging cases reported by local media outlets around the country. One such site, Fatal Encounters, which supplied the data for the above visualization, compiles crowdcourced news reports of these incidents and hosts a public, searchable database. Managed by D. Brian Burghart, editor and publisher of the Reno News & Review, the site is by no means comprehensive -- it shows less than 50% of all incidents, by Burghart's estimate --  but does list significantly more cases than those reported to the FBI.

As the designers of the visualization note: "Since no comprehensive national database exists, collecting the data from reliable local and national news reports -- while imperfect -- is the next best thing. It is not a full and comprehensive data set and many incidents lack full details or may be missing from the data entirely."

The news site Vox produced the following interactive map, which also uses data from the Fatal Encounters. It shows the more than 5,600 officer-involved homicides since 2000 that have been reported to the project. The vast majority of the deaths are from gunshots.