Deaths by US police gunfire to reach 1,000 in 2017: Report

US Capitol Police arrest a protester demonstrating against the US Senate Republican health care bill, outside the office of US Senator Patrick Toomey, Republican of Pennsylvania, on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, June 28, 2017. (Photo by AFP)

The US police will have killed some 1,000 people by the end of this year, says a report based on the record of the first half of 2017 as well as the past years’ counts.

So far this year, police forces in the United States have shot 492 people dead, The Washington Post reported on Saturday.

The death toll on June 16 this year is identical to last year's tally, said the report, speculating that American police will tread the same path.

"These numbers show us that officer-involved shootings are constant over time," Geoffrey Alpert, a criminologist at the University of South Carolina, told the Post, which has been tracking US police fatal shootings since 2015. "Some places go up, some go down, but its averaging out. This is our society in the 21st century."

The tracking project, which began after the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014, has so far found twice as many police shootings than those recorded by the FBI.

In November 2014, a predominantly white grand jury -- of nine white and three black judges -- decided not to indict a white officer named Darren Wilson for killing Brown (pictured above), causing months of unrest across the country.

African-Americans are far more likely to be shot, arrested and imprisoned by police than any other racial group, according to various studies.