The killing of Tyre Nichols in January 2023 by Memphis Police Officers has reignited debates about police brutality in the United States. Between 2013 and 2024, over 1,000 people have been killed by police every year. Some of the most infamous examples include the murder of George Floyd in May 2020 and the shooting of Breonna Taylor earlier that year. Within the provided time period, the most people killed by police in the United States was in 2024, at 1,375 people. Police Violence in the U.S. Police violence is defined as any instance where a police officer’s use of force results in a civilian’s death, regardless of whether it is considered justified by the law. While many people killed by police in the U.S. were shot, other causes of death have included tasers, vehicles, and physical restraints or beatings. In the United States, the rate of police shootings is much higher for Black Americans than it is for any other ethnicity, and recent incidents of police killing unarmed Black men and women in the United States have led to widespread protests against police brutality, particularly towards communities of color. America’s Persistent Police Problem Despite increasing visibility surrounding police violence in recent years, police killings have continued to occur in the United States at a consistently high rate. In comparison to other countries, police in the U.S. have killed people at a rate three times higher than police in Canada and 60 times the rate of police in England. While U.S. police have killed people in almost all 50 states, as well as the District of Columbia, New Mexico was reported to have the highest rate of people killed by the police in the United States, with 8.03 people per million inhabitants killed by police.

Sadly, the trend of fatal police shootings in the United States seems to only be increasing, with a total 1,173 civilians having been shot, 248 of whom were Black, as of December 2024. In 2023, there were 1,164 fatal police shootings. Additionally, the rate of fatal police shootings among Black Americans was much higher than that for any other ethnicity, standing at 6.1 fatal shootings per million of the population per year between 2015 and 2024. Police brutality in the U.S. In recent years, particularly since the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014, police brutality has become a hot button issue in the United States. The number of homicides committed by police in the United States is often compared to those in countries such as England, where the number is significantly lower. Black Lives Matter The Black Lives Matter Movement, formed in 2013, has been a vocal part of the movement against police brutality in the U.S. by organizing “die-ins”, marches, and demonstrations in response to the killings of black men and women by police. While Black Lives Matter has become a controversial movement within the U.S., it has brought more attention to the number and frequency of police shootings of civilians.

"In 2015, The Washington Post began to log every fatal shooting by an on-duty police officer in the United States. In that time there have been more than 5,000 such shootings recorded by The Post. After Michael Brown, an unarmed Black man, was killed in 2014 by police in Ferguson, Mo., a Post investigation found that the FBI undercounted fatal police shootings by more than half. This is because reporting by police departments is voluntary and many departments fail to do so. The Washington Post’s data relies primarily on news accounts, social media postings, and police reports. Analysis of more than five years of data reveals that the number and circumstances of fatal shootings and the overall demographics of the victims have remained relatively constant..." SOURCE ==> Washington Post Article

For more information about this story

This dataset has been prepared by The Washington Post (they keep updating it on runtime) with every fatal shooting in the United States by a police officer in the line of duty since Jan. 1, 2015.

2016 PoliceKillingUS DATASET
2017 PoliceKillingUS DATASET
2018 PoliceKillingUS DATASET
2019 PoliceKillingUS DATASET
2020 PoliceKillingUS DATASET

Features at the Dataset:

The file fatal-police-shootings-data.csv contains data about each fatal shooting in CSV format. The file can be downloaded at this URL. Each row has the following variables:

• id: a unique identifier for each victim
• name: the name of the victim
• date: the date of the fatal shooting in YYYY-MM-DD format
• manner_of_death: shot, shot and Tasered
• armed: indicates that the victim was armed with some sort of implement that a police officer believed could inflict harm
  • undetermined: it is not known whether or not the victim had a weapon
  • unknown: the victim was armed, but it is not known what the object was
  • unarmed: the victim was not armed
• age: the age of the victim
• gender: the gender of the victim. The Post identifies victims by the gender they identify with if reports indicate that it differs from their biological sex.
  • M: Male
  • F: Female
  • None: unknown
• race:
  • W: White, non-Hispanic
  • B: Black, non-Hispanic
  • A: Asian
  • N: Native American
  • H: Hispanic
  • O: Other
  • None: unknown
• city: the municipality where the fatal shooting took place. Note that in some cases this field may contain a county name if a more specific municipality is unavailable or unknown.
• state: two-letter postal code abbreviation
• signs of mental illness: News reports have indicated the victim had a history of mental health issues, expressed suicidal intentions or was experiencing mental distress at the time of the shooting.
• threat_level: The threat_level column was used to flag incidents for the story by Amy Brittain in October 2015. http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/2015/10/24/on-duty-under-fire/ As described in the story, the general criteria for the attack label was that there was the most direct and immediate threat to life. That would include incidents where officers or others were shot at, threatened with a gun, attacked with other weapons or physical force, etc. The attack category is meant to flag the highest level of threat. The other and undetermined categories represent all remaining cases. Other includes many incidents where officers or others faced significant threats.
• flee: News reports have indicated the victim was moving away from officers
  • Foot
  • Car
  • Not fleeing

The threat column and the fleeing column are not necessarily related. For example, there is an incident in which the suspect is fleeing and at the same time turns to fire at gun at the officer. Also, attacks represent a status immediately before fatal shots by police while fleeing could begin slightly earlier and involve a chase. - body_camera: News reports have indicated an officer w...

As of December 31, the U.S. police shot 1,173 people to death in 2024. In 2023, 1,164 people were shot to death by police in the United States. Police treatment Since as early as the 18th century, police brutality has been a significant issue in the United States. Black Americans have been especially marginalized by police officers, as they have faced higher rates of fatal police shootings compared to other ethnicities. Disparities also exist in perceptions of police treatment depending on ethnicity. A majority of Black Americans think that Black and White people do not receive equal police treatment, while more than half of White and Hispanic Americans think the same. Police reform The upsurge in Black Lives Matter protests in response to the killing of Black Americans as a result of police brutality has created a call for police reform. In 2019, it was found that police killings decreased by a quarter in police departments that implemented a policy that requires officers to use all other means before shooting. Since the killing of George Floyd in May 2020, 21 states, including New York and California, have passed bills that focused on police supervision.

This dataset contains information on fatal police deaths in the United States. The data includes the victim's rank, name, department, date of death, and cause of death. The data spans from 1791 to the present day. This dataset will be updated on monthly basis. Data Scrapped from this website :- https://www.odmp.org/

New Version Features -> With the new web scrapper I have upgraded dataset with more information. 1) The new dataset version is "police_deaths_USA_v6.csv" and "k9_deaths_USA_v6.csv". 2) Splitted the dataset into 2 different datasets 1 for Human Unit and other for K9 Unit. 3) Check out the new web scrapper code in this file "final_scrapper_program_with_comments.ipynb". 4) Also added the correction file which is needed to adjust some data points from K9 dataset. 5) Extended data of Human Unit dataset to 13 Features. 6) Extended data of K9 Unit dataset to 14 Features.

The police_deaths dataset contains 13 variables:

1) Rank -> Rank assigned or achieved by the police throughout their tenure.

2) Name -> The name of the person.

3) Age -> Age of the person.

4) End_Of_Watch -> The death date on which the the person declared as dead.

5) Day_Of_Week -> The day of the week [Sunday, Monday, etc.].

6) Cause -> The cause of the death.

7) Department -> The department's name where the person works.

8) State -> The state where the department is situated.

9) Tour -> The Duration of there Tenure.

10) Badge -> Badge of the person.

11) Weapon -> The Weapon by which the officer has been killed.

12) Offender -> Offender / Killer this says what happened to the offender after the incident was he/she [Arrested, Killed, etc.].

13) Summary -> Summary of the police officer and also the summary of the incident of what happened ? How he/she died ?, etc.

The k9_deaths dataset contains 14 variables:

1) Rank -> Rank assigned or achieved by the K9 throughout their tenure.

2) Name -> The name of the K9.

3) Breed -> Breed of the K9.

4) Gender -> Gender of the K9.

5) Age -> Age of the K9.

6) End_Of_Watch -> The death date on which the the person declared as dead.

7) Day_Of_Week -> The day of the week [Sunday, Monday, etc.].

8) Cause -> The cause of the death.

9) Department -> The department's name where the K9 was assigned.

10) State -> The state where the department is situated.

11) Tour -> The Duration of there Tenure.

12) Weapon -> The Weapon by which the officer has been killed.

13) Offender -> Offender / Killer this says what happened to the offender after the incident was he/she [Arrested, Killed, etc.].

14) Summary -> Summary of the K9 dog and also the summary of the incident of what happened ? How he/she died ?, etc.

Acknowledgements:

The original dataset was collected by FiveThirtyEight and it contains police death data from 1791 to 2016. Here is the link -> https://data.world/fivethirtyeight/police-deaths.

The reason I made this dataset is because it had not been updated since 2016 and the scrapping script was outdated, so I decided to make a new scrapper and update the dataset till present. I got this idea from the FiveThirtyEight group and a fellow kaggler, Satoshi Datamoto, who uploaded the dataset on kaggle. Thank you for inspiration.

Tableau Visualization link :- https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/mayuresh.koli/viz/USALawEnforcementLineofDutyDeaths/main_dashboard

The study was a comprehensive analysis of felonious killings of officers. The purposes of the study were (1) to analyze the nature and circumstances of incidents of felonious police killings and (2) to analyze trends in the numbers and rates of killings across different types of agencies and to explain these differences. For Part 1, Incident-Level Data, an incident-level database was created to capture all incidents involving the death of a police officer from 1983 through 1992. Data on officers and incidents were collected from the Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted (LEOKA) data collection as coded by the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program. In addition to the UCR data, the Police Foundation also coded information from the LEOKA narratives that are not part of the computerized LEOKA database from the FBI. For Part 2, Agency-Level Data, the researchers created an agency-level database to research systematic differences among rates at which law enforcement officers had been feloniously killed from 1977 through 1992. The investigators focused on the 56 largest law enforcement agencies because of the availability of data for explanatory variables. Variables in Part 1 include year of killing, involvement of other officers, if the officer was killed with his/her own weapon, circumstances of the killing, location of fatal wounds, distance between officer and offender, if the victim was wearing body armor, if different officers were killed in the same incident, if the officer was in uniform, actions of the killer and of the officer at entry and final stage, if the killer was visible at first, if the officer thought the killer was a felon suspect, if the officer was shot at entry, and circumstances at anticipation, entry, and final stages. Demographic variables for Part 1 include victim's sex, age, race, type of assignment, rank, years of experience, agency, population group, and if the officer was working a security job. Part 2 contains variables describing the general municipal environment, such as whether the agency is located in the South, level of poverty according to a poverty index, population density, percent of population that was Hispanic or Black, and population aged 15-34 years old. Variables capturing the crime environment include the violent crime rate, property crime rate, and a gun-related crime index. Lastly, variables on the environment of the police agencies include violent and property crime arrests per 1,000 sworn officers, percentage of officers injured in assaults, and number of sworn officers.

This data was obtained from https://mappingpoliceviolence.us/.

Mapping Police Violence is a 501(c)(3) organization that publishes the most comprehensive and up-to-date data on police violence in America to support transformative change.

This is a database set on openly sharing information on police violence in America.

Some information on this data according to their website: Our data has been meticulously sourced from official police use of force data collection programs in states like California, Texas and Virginia, combined with nationwide data from The Gun Violence Archive and the Fatal Encounters database, two impartial crowdsourced databases. We've also done extensive original research to further improve the quality and completeness of the data; searching social media, obituaries, criminal records databases, police reports and other sources to identify the race of 90 percent of all victims in the database.

We believe the data represented on this site is the most comprehensive accounting of people killed by police since 2013. Note that the Mapping Police Violence database is more comprehensive than the Washington Post police shootings database: while WaPo only tracks cases where people are fatally shot by on-duty police officers, our database includes additional incidents such as cases where police kill someone through use of a chokehold, baton, taser or other means as well as cases such as killings by off-duty police. A recent report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics estimated approximately 1,200 people were killed by police between June, 2015 and May, 2016. Our database identified 1,100 people killed by police over this time period. While there are undoubtedly police killings that are not included in our database (namely, those that go unreported by the media), these estimates suggest that our database captures 92% of the total number of police killings that have occurred since 2013. We hope these data will be used to provide greater transparency and accountability for police departments as part of the ongoing work to end police violence in America.

For most of the last 35 years, the number of police officers who die on the job in the U.S. declined, but one grim statistic held steady: The most common cause of death was gun homicide. Those numbers grew significantly on Thursday night when five police officers were shot and killed at a demonstration in Dallas that was protesting recent killings by police officers in other states. President Obama called it “a vicious, calculated and despicable attack on law enforcement.” Per officer, policing had become even safer in recent years than the overall death counts suggest, which makes the Dallas shooting that much more of a singular, horrific massacre. That’s because the decline in the number of deaths by police officers in the line of duty has occurred as the number of officers has risen. The number of full-time, sworn local police officers increased by 35 percent from 1987 to 2013, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. During that same period, the number of officers killed declined by 34 percent. 1 And a growing share of officer deaths are happening in accidental or deliberate car collisions.

The rate of fatal police shootings in the United States shows large differences based on ethnicity. Among Black Americans, the rate of fatal police shootings between 2015 and December 2024 stood at 6.1 per million of the population per year, while for white Americans, the rate stood at 2.4 fatal police shootings per million of the population per year. Police brutality in the United States Police brutality is a major issue in the United States, but recently saw a spike in online awareness and protests following the murder of George Floyd, an African American who was killed by a Minneapolis police officer. Just a few months before, Breonna Taylor was fatally shot in her apartment when Louisville police officers forced entry into her apartment. Despite the repeated fatal police shootings across the country, police accountability has not been adequate according to many Americans. A majority of Black Americans thought that police officers were not held accountable for their misconduct, while less than half of White Americans thought the same. Political opinions Not only are there differences in opinion between ethnicities on police brutality, but there are also major differences between political parties. A majority of Democrats in the United States thought that police officers were not held accountable for their misconduct, while a majority of Republicans that they were held accountable. Despite opposing views on police accountability, both Democrats and Republicans agree that police should be required to be trained in nonviolent alternatives to deadly force.

Context

This dataset contains data behind the story, The Dallas Shooting Was Among The Deadliest For Police In U.S. History. The data are scraped from ODMP and capture information on all tracked on-duty police officer deaths in the U.S. broken down by cause from 1971 until 2016.

Content

This dataset tags every entry as human or canine. There are 10 variables:

• person

• dept: Department

• eow: End of watch

• cause: Cause of death

• cause_short: Shortened cause of death

• date: Cleaned EOW

• year: Year from EOW

• canine

• dept_name

• state

Inspiration

Using the data, can you determine the temporal trend of police officer deaths by cause? By state? By department?

Acknowledgements

The primary source of data is the Officer Down Memorial Page (ODMP), started in 1996 by a college student who is now a police officer and who continues to maintain the database. The original data and code can be found on the FiveThirtyEight GitHub.

The Counted is a project by the Guardian – and you – working to count the number of people killed by police and other law enforcement agencies in the United States throughout 2015 and 2016, to monitor their demographics and to tell the stories of how they died.

The database will combine Guardian reporting with verified crowdsourced information to build a more comprehensive record of such fatalities. The Counted is the most thorough public accounting for deadly use of force in the US, but it will operate as an imperfect work in progress – and will be updated by Guardian reporters and interactive journalists frequently.

Any deaths arising directly from encounters with law enforcement will be included in the database. This will inevitably include, but will likely not be limited to, people who were shot, tasered and struck by police vehicles as well those who died in police custody. Self-inflicted deaths during encounters with law enforcement or in police custody or detention facilities will not be included.

The US government has no comprehensive record of the number of people killed by law enforcement. This lack of basic data has been glaring amid the protests, riots and worldwide debate set in motion by the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown in August 2014. The Guardian agrees with those analysts, campaign groups, activists and authorities who argue that such accounting is a prerequisite for an informed public discussion about the use of force by police.

Contributions of any information that may improve the quality of our data will be greatly welcomed as we work toward better accountability. Please contact us at thecounted@theguardian.com.

CREDITS
Research and Reporting: Jon Swaine, Oliver Laughland, Jamiles Lartey
Design and Production: Kenan Davis, Rich Harris, Nadja Popovich, Kenton Powell

Since the 1780s, over 25,000 United States law enforcement officers have died while on active duty, or due to injuries and illnesses obtained while on duty. Gunfire is responsible for over half of all total law enforcement deaths recorded, particularly before the 1930s. From this point on, the total share of gunfire deaths has decreased significantly, mostly due to the increase in vehicle or health related deaths, although gunfire has remained the most common individual cause of death in almost every year. Gunfire deaths These deaths rose steadily after the Civil War, and peaked at over 200 annual deaths during the 1920s, due to the increase in criminal activity during prohibition. Because of this, the National Firearms Act of 1934 was introduced in an attempt to reduce gun-related crime, by requiring the registration of any transfer of ownership and imposing a tax on gun manufacturers and distributors. After Prohibition's end and the introduction of these measures, annual law enforcement deaths from gunfire have been well below 100 in almost every year, except for a brief spike in the early 1970s, during the crime wave that began in the 1960s and the beginning of the "War on Drugs". Overall, gunfire deaths of law enforcement have fallen since the 1970s, reaching a low of just 34 deaths in 2013. In contrast, the total number of people killed by police shootings has consistently been above one thousand for most of the past decade.

Increase in health-related deaths

The majority of non-gunfire deaths are a result of vehicle-related accidents, and the number of crashes and accidents rose throughout the 20th century in line with the increase in car ownership. However, the number of deaths from heart attacks and job-related illness has also risen over time, due to the aging of the population and increasingly unhealthy lifestyle trends across the country. In recent decades, additional health issues have emerged that have had a disproportionate impact on law enforcement. In 2001, 72 officers died as a result of the September 11th terrorist attacks, and over 350 additional deaths have been attributed to the adverse health effects (primarily respiratory illnesses) sustained by first responders from law enforcement. From 2020-2022, COVID-19 became the largest single cause of law enforcement deaths. Figures relate to cases where the individual contracted COVID-19 while on duty, and highlights the increased exposure to the virus faced by those considered to be frontline or essential workers. This number is likely to fall in the future as infection rates fall and newer strains of the virus are less lethal.

Version 3 release notes:

• Fix bug where Philadelphia Police Department had incorrect FIPS county code.

The LEOKA data sets contain highly detailed data about the number of officers/civilians employed by an agency and how many officers were killed or assaulted. Each data set contains over 2,200 columns and has a wealth of information about the circumstances of assaults on officers.

All the data was downloaded from NACJD as ASCII+SPSS Setup files and read into R using the package asciiSetupReader. It was then cleaned in R. The "cleaning" just means that column names were standardized (different years have slightly different spellings for many columns). Standardization of column names is necessary to stack multiple years together. Categorical variables (e.g. state) were also standardized (i.e. fix spelling errors).

About 7% of all agencies in the data report more officers or civilians than population. As such, I removed the officers/civilians per 1,000 population variables. You should exercise caution if deciding to generate and use these variables yourself.

I did not make any changes to the numeric columns except for the following. A few years of data had the values "blank" or "missing" as indicators of missing values. Rows in otherwise numeric columns (e.g. jan_asslt_no_injury_knife) with these values were replaced with NA. There were three obvious data entry errors in officers killed by felony/accident that I changed to NA.

In 1978 the agency "pittsburgh" (ORI = PAPPD00) reported 576 officers killed by accident during March.
In 1979 the agency "metuchen" (ORI = NJ01210) reported 991 officers killed by felony during August.
In 1990 the agency "penobscot state police" (ORI = ME010SP) reported 860 officers killed by accident during July.

No other changes to numeric columns were made.

Each zip file contains all years as individual monthly files of the specified data type It also includes a file with all years aggregated yearly and stacked into a single data set. Please note that each monthly file is quite large (2,200+ columns) so it may take time to download the zip file and open each data file.

For the R code used to clean this data, see here. https://github.com/jacobkap/crime_data.

The UCR Handbook (https://ucr.fbi.gov/additional-ucr-publications/ucr_handbook.pdf/view) describes the LEOKA data as follows:

"The UCR Program collects data from all contributing agencies ... on officer line-of-duty deaths and assaults. Reporting agencies must submit data on ... their own duly sworn officers feloniously or accidentally killed or assaulted in the line of duty. The purpose of this data collection is to identify situations in which officers are killed or assaulted, describe the incidents statistically, and publish the data to aid agencies in developing policies to improve officer safety.

"... agencies must record assaults on sworn officers. Reporting agencies must count all assaults that resulted in serious injury or assaults in which a weapon was used that could have caused serious injury or death. They must include other assaults not causing injury if the assault involved more than mere verbal abuse or minor resistance to an arrest. In other words, agencies must include in this section all assaults on officers, whether or not the officers sustained injuries."

If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions please contact me at jkkaplan6@gmail.com

The circumstances surrounding "justifiable homicides" by police are the focus of this data collection, which examines occurrences in 57 United States cities during the period 1970-1979. Homicides by on- and off-duty police officers serving communities of 250,000 or more were studied. Data were collected through a survey questionnaire sent to police executives of the 57 cities. The Federal Bureau of Investigation supplied data on justifiable homicides by police, including age, sex, and race data. The variables include number of sworn officers, number of supervisory officers, average years of education, department regulations about issues such as off-duty employment, uniforms, carrying firearms, and disciplinary actions, in-service training, pre-service training, firearms practice, assignments without firearms, on-duty deaths, and off-duty deaths. The study was funded by a grant from the National Institute of Justice to the International Association of Chiefs of Police.

This dataset is one of three that pull together data from several different sources regarding police-related violence and racial equity in the United States. The datasets currently include these types of data:

Part 1: Citizen deaths, police deaths, and other outcomes - Police shootings - Citizen fatalities involving police - Police officer deaths suffered in the line of duty

Part 2: Demographics, crime stats, protests, and other data - Social and economic data - Political leanings of citizens - Sales of DoD equipment to law enforcement agencies - City budgets - Police department headcounts - Police department policies and contract provisions - Juvenile arrests by type of crime and race - Crimes and arrests for the prime city in the four largest metro areas. - Protest activity - Police response - Press activity - Video clips of incidents

I don't believe that any amount of data can fully describe the social dysfunction we have. At the same time, I hope these datasets can be an objective source for providing thoughtful, fact-based analysis of this important issue.

About this dataset

The Washington Post compiled a dataset of every fatal shooting in the United States by a police officer in the line of duty since Jan. 1, 2015.

In 2015, The Post began tracking more than a dozen details about each killing by culling local news reports, law enforcement websites and social media and by monitoring independent databases such as Killed by Police and Fatal Encounters. The available features are: - Race of the deceased; - Circumstances of the shooting; - Whether the person was armed; - Whether the victim was experiencing a mental-health crisis; - Among others.

In 2016, The Post is gathering additional information about each fatal shooting that occurs this year and is filing open-records requests with departments. More than a dozen additional details are being collected about officers in each shooting.

The Post is documenting only those shootings in which a police officer, in the line of duty, shot and killed a civilian — the circumstances that most closely parallel the 2014 killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., which began the protest movement culminating in Black Lives Matter and an increased focus on police accountability nationwide. The Post is not tracking deaths of people in police custody, fatal shootings by off-duty officers or non-shooting deaths.

The FBI and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention log fatal shootings by police, but officials acknowledge that their data is incomplete. In 2015, The Post documented more than two times more fatal shootings by police than had been recorded by the FBI. Last year, the FBI announced plans to overhaul how it tracks fatal police encounters.

How to use this dataset

• Understanding US Police Shootings by Curtis Thompson
• Dataset Questions and Suggestions
• More datasets

Acknowledgements

If you use this dataset in your research, please credit the authors.

BibTeX

@misc{wapo-police-shootings-bot , author = {The Washington Post}, title = {data-police-shootings}, month = jan, year = 2015, publisher = {Github}, url = {https://github.com/washingtonpost/data-police-shootings} }

License

CC BY NC SA 4.0

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As of November 25, 251 people aged 45 years and over were fatally shot by U.S. law enforcement officers in 2024. 310 people in the same age group were shot to death by police in 2023, and 263 in 2022.

This dataset, compiled by The Washington Post, logs every person shot and killed by an on-duty police officer in the United States from 2015 to 2024. Following the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, it was discovered that FBI reports were significantly undercounted, with only a third of fatal shootings recorded by 2021. This comprehensive database aims to fill that gap and provide detailed information on each incident, including the police departments involved, to enhance accountability.

The Washington Post is compiling a database of every fatal shooting in the United States by a police officer in the line of duty since Jan. 1, 2015.

In 2015, The Post began tracking more than a dozen details about each killing — including the race of the deceased, the circumstances of the shooting, whether the person was armed and whether the person was experiencing a mental-health crisis — by culling local news reports, law enforcement websites and social media, and by monitoring independent databases such as Killed by Police and Fatal Encounters. The Post conducted additional reporting in many cases.

In 2016, The Post is gathering additional information about each fatal shooting by police that occurs this year and is filing open-records requests with departments. More than a dozen additional details are being collected about officers in each shooting. Officers’ names are being included in the database after The Post contacts the departments to request comment.

The Post is documenting only those shootings in which a police officer, in the line of duty, shoots and kills a civilian — the circumstances that most closely parallel the 2014 killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., which began the protest movement culminating in Black Lives Matter and an increased focus on police accountability nationwide. The Post is not tracking deaths of people in police custody, fatal shootings by off-duty officers or non-shooting deaths. The FBI and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention log fatal shootings by police, but officials acknowledge that their data is incomplete. In 2015, The Post documented more than twice as many fatal shootings by police as had been recorded by the FBI. Last year, the FBI announced plans to overhaul how it tracks fatal police encounters.

The Post's database is updated regularly as fatal shootings are reported and as facts emerge about individual cases. The Post is seeking assistance in making the database as comprehensive as possible. To provide information about fatal police shootings since Jan. 1, 2015, send us an email at policeshootingsfeedback@washpost.com. The Post is also interested in obtaining photos of the deceased and original videos of fatal encounters with police.

Data Dictionary

...

Key	List of...	Comment	Example Value
Person.Name	String	Full name of the individual or "Unknown" if not reported	"Tim Elliot"
Person.Age	Integer	Age in years of the individual or 0 (zero) if not reported	53
Person.Gender	String	One of Male, Female, or Unknown	"Male"
Person.Race	String	One of Asian, African American, White, Hispanic, Native American, Other, or Unknown.	"Asian"
Incident.Date.Month	Integer	Month (1-12) in which the shooting occurred	1
Incident.Date.Day	Integer	Day (1-31) in which the shooting occurred	2
Incident.Date.Year	Integer	Year (2015-2019) in which the shooting occurred	2015
Incident.Date.Full	String	Date in which shooting occurred (Year/Month/Day)	"2015/01/02"
Incident.Location.City	String	Name of city in which the shooting occurred	"Shelton"
Incident.Location.State	String	Name of U.S. State in which the shooting occurred	"WA"
Factors.Armed	String	Description of any weapon carried by the person (.e., "gun", "knife", "unarmed"); value is "unknown" if not reported.	"gun"
Factors.Mental-Illness	Boolean	True if factors of mental illness were perceived in the person; False otherwise	True
Factors.Threat-Level	String	Threat of person as perceived by police. One of "attack", "undetermined", or "other"; value is "unknown" if not reported.	"attack"
Factors.Fleeing	String	Means by which person was fleeing (e.g., "Car", "Foot") or "Not fleeing"; value is "unknown" if not reported.	"Not fleeing"
Shooting.Manner

This dataset contains the details of deaths in police custody/lock-up compiled by NCRB. It has details of deaths of both 'persons in remand' and 'persons not in remand'.