Spotlight: Black men disproportionately subject to police shooting in U.S.

A total of 965 American civilians were shot and killed by U.S. police in 2015, and unarmed black men were six times more likely to fall victim than whites, U.S. media reported Sunday.

Among the victims of the police shootings, 564 were armed with a gun, 281 armed with less threatening weapons such as knives, toy weapons or cutting instruments, but 90 were unarmed, according to the Washington Post report.

The U.S. broadsheet reported earlier that the United States has recorded 351 gun attacks in the first 11 months this year, with 1.05 cases everyday on average.

The latest gun attack occurred on Christmas Eve in Charlotte, North Carolina, when a man pulled a gun and opened fire inside a mall, injuring one man. The gunman has been shot dead by police.

Such shootings exposed the U.S. loose gun-control policy featuring easy access to guns and wide spread of privately owned guns, especially owned by white men, with the proof that in majority of cases in which police shot and killed a person who had attacked someone with a weapon or brandished a gun, the person who was shot was white.

U.S. President Barack Obama has admitted the high frequency of shooting attacks in his country, saying: "We should never think that this is something that just happens in the ordinary course of events, because it doesn't happen with the same frequency in other countries."

The president has called many times for stricter gun control. However, in an interview earlier this year, Obama called the failure to reform U.S. gun laws "one of the greatest frustrations" of his presidency.

On the other hand, though only 9 percent of the shootings involved unarmed civilians, they were disproportionately black, according to the Post's Sunday analysis.

Although black men make up only 6 percent of the U.S. population, they account for 40 percent, or 36, of the unarmed men shot to death by police in 2015.

The Post also found that a hugely disproportionate number -- three in five -- of those killed after exhibiting less threatening behavior were black or Hispanic.

The killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014, ignited a national debate on the excessive use of force by U.S. police and sparked black civil rights movements.

Early this year, the Justice Department released a scathing report of the Ferguson police force in Missouri that pointed to widespread discrimination against the black communities among local law enforcement officials.

Apart from the excessive and unjustified use of force against black people and communities, Ferguson law enforcement officials systematically relied on unlawful and hefty fines on African-Americans to create revenue increases, the report revealed.

Motivated by the Ferguson shooting, the Post launched a comprehensive project to log every on-duty fatal shooting by U.S. police in 2015. It found that U.S. police nationwide were killing more than twice as many people as the Federal Bureau of Investigation had previously reported.

In most cases, the police officers were not indicted for excessive use of force.

In 2015, only 18 officers were indicted in killings, though it nearly tripled the number in the past decade, which averaged five per year. There were 47 such indictments in the years between 2005 and 2014.

In October 2014, 70-year-old black teenager Laquan McDonald was shot 16 times to death by Chicago police, but the video of his shooting was not released until November 2015.

It was later known that the local police erased surveillance videos from a nearby Burger King, which may have captured McDonald's movement in the critical moment before the shooting, leading to public outcry about a police cover-up.

Police documents showed several officers who witnessed the shooting appeared to give misleading information to investigators, with one account stating that Jason Van Dyke, the white officer who fired, had been injured by McDonald in the shooting.

The report said there is a need for better police training, as more than half of the killings involved police agencies that have not provided officers with state-of-the-art training to de-escalate such encounters. Endi