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.