Gizmodo looks at the data newly available at a California Department of Justice website launched this week that publishes detailed information about police interactions with the public, including the number of people who die at the hands of police as well as a count of officers killed or assaulted while on duty. Called Open Justice, the initiative is billed as the first of its kind to provide detailed data to the public on a variety of crime statistics. The California DOJ says the data release is a step towards more transparency amid America's ongoing controversy about police-involved deaths.
Open Justice has two components: a website called Dashboard that includes graphs and more easily digestible stats and the Open Data Portal, which includes the raw data on criminal justice in California. The data shows that 6,837 people died while in the custody of California police from 2005 to 2014. The single largest cause of death was natural causes, at just over 61 percent, while the second most common cause, homicide, accounted for about 14 percent. Roughly 60 percent of people who died in custody were non-white. About 29 percent of those killed were Hispanic and 24 percent black.