In August 2014, a black 18-year-old man named Michael Brown was shot dead by police after a brawl in St. Louis' working-class suburb of Ferguson, Missouri.
It got the Washington Post to start a database of all police shootings in the United States.
And the figures show that 25 percent of those shot to death by police since 2015 have been black.
This is despite the fact that African Americans make up just over 13 percent of the population.
It is thus a clear over-representation.
Blacks in the United States are thus more than twice as likely to be shot dead by a police officer on duty, compared to whites.
If the over-representation is due to prejudice among the police, it is difficult to answer.
Research shows that crime is higher among blacks - and that socio-economic factors affect.
The US Secretary of State for Internal Security, Chad Wolf, denies that there is systematic racism within the police.
Young men overrepresented
In total, police in the United States kill close to 1,000 people each year, or an average of three people a day.
That figure has been constant for the past five years, according to Washington Post statistics.
The figures also show that the vast majority of those shot and killed by police are men, 95 percent.
More than half of the victims are young, between 20 and 40 years old.
The Washington Post's database includes only those shootings where a police officer on duty shoots and kills a civilian person. People who die in police custody, fatal shootings by police officers who are not on duty or shootings that do not lead to death are not included in the database. The statistics are collected from the police but also from news reporting, social media and police reports, as the police's own official statistics are not complete.