Baton Rouge cop killer Gavin Eugene Long and others who have killed police officers in the line of duty are included in The Washington Post’s Pulitzer Prize-award winning “Fatal Force” database, a review conducted by The Daily Caller finds.
The database also counts Omar Mateen, the Islamist who was killed by police in Orlando after slaughtering 49 people at a gay nightclub, as one of the 533 people killed by cops so far this year.
The database, which includes demographics of individuals fatally shot by police as well as details about their background and the circumstances of the shooting, has been touted by reporters and activists for filling in a gap left by the FBI’s limited statistics.
But the database — which counted 990 police shooting victims last year — is often cited by activists without the important context that many of the people killed by police officers deserved it.
The Post began building the database in response to the Aug. 2014 police-involved shooting of Michael Brown, which many activists and progressives claim was a case of excessive force. That despite Brown attempting to steal the gun of the officer who ended up fatally shooting him.
Wesley Lowery, a Post reporter who is considered an ally of the Black Lives Matter movement, has bragged that he suggested the idea for the database to his editors.
The description for Long in the database notes he was killed after shooting three Baton Rouge police officers on Sunday. The Post determined that the former Marine and ex-Nation of Islam member suffered from mental illness. It also lists him as “not fleeing” from police when he was shot. The officers involved in shooting Long were not identified, according to The Post database, and there was no body cam recording from the shooting.
Jorge Zambrano is listed as well. On May 22, 2016, Zambrano was killed after fatally shooting a Massachusetts state police officer following a traffic stop.