This was made with Washington Post's Police shootings data, on r studio.

For context, "threat level" is a police shootings variable with possible values "attack", "other" and "undetermined."

The Thin Blue Line, as a phrase, refers to the position of police in society as the force which holds back chaos. On the graph, the blue line shows the real count of people shot and killed by police over time. The black line shows the total count of people shot and killed by police over the same period of time. The vertical distance between the blue and black line represents cumulative the number of people shot and killed by police with a threat level status of "other" or "undetermined" by that point in time.

Since illegal, political police violence is often informed by Thin Blue Line ideology, whether as a consequence of militarized procedures or in so far as militarization gives cover to otherwise unacceptable abuse, the unnecessary use of deadly force in officer involved shootings is rightly characterized as terrorism, per the commonly accepted definition of terrorism.

I know the graphic is loud and editorialized but it was created for an opinion article which you can find here https://patreon.com/newpress . Some people may object to its editorial nature but but the stakes are high right now and this obvious trend has gone acknowledged by the people who need to recognize it most, I think most people can agree with that. I'm not trying to be bombastic, I just don't know what else to do but load my gun and I'd prefer not to go there.

End note: On the graphic I classified all cases with a threat level other than "attack" as "not attacking". This is based on the assumption that if the circumstances of a police shooting could be classified as an attack, police are heavily incentivized to report it as such, so it seems unlikely that variable would be excluded in the original report. Also, I took a random sample of all cases where the threat level is "undetermined" from 2015-2019 (about 270 cases in all) and with every case I checked directly I found media reports suggesting that the facts supported that the victim was indeed "not attacking" when shot and killed. It's possible, however, that some cases with a threat level of undetermined may eventually be corrected to "attack" but it appears those cases are few and far between and would not have a significant impact on average slope of the counts shown.