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.

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.

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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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 January 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 victim 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 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, Missouri, 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.

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, send us an email at policeshootingsfeedback@washpost.com.

CREDITS
Research and Reporting: Julie Tate, Jennifer Jenkins and Steven Rich
Production and Presentation: John Muyskens, Kennedy Elliott and Ted Mellnik

Number, percentage and rate (per 100,000 population) of homicide victims, by racialized identity group (total, by racialized identity group; racialized identity group; South Asian; Chinese; Black; Filipino; Arab; Latin American; Southeast Asian; West Asian; Korean; Japanese; other racialized identity group; multiple racialized identity; racialized identity, but racialized identity group is unknown; rest of the population; unknown racialized identity group), gender (all genders; male; female; gender unknown) and region (Canada; Atlantic region; Quebec; Ontario; Prairies region; British Columbia; territories), 2019 to 2024.

Values are: posterior mean (posterior standard deviation) of the regression coefficients. The symbol log referes to the natural logarithm. Pop refers to absolute population size. Pct. B. refers to the percentage of the county population that is black. Md. In. refers to median income. Gini refers to the Gini index of inequality. GRP refers to the Google search racism proxy. W. Ast and B. Ast refer to the white- and black-specific arrest rates for assualt, respectively. W. Wps and B. Wps refer to the white- and black-specific arrest rates for weapons violations, respectively. Posterior probabilty that a postive regression coeffcient is less than zero (or a negative one greater than zero) is coded as: * indicates a probability between 0.10 and 0.05, ** indicates a probability between 0.05 and 0.01, and *** indicates a probability of 0.01 or less.

This is five years of police use of force data for all 468 New Jersey municipal police departments and the New Jersey State Police compiled by NJ Advance Media for The Force Report.

When police punch, pepper spray or use other force against someone in New Jersey, they are required to fill out a form detailing what happened. NJ Advance Media filed 506 public records requests and received 72,607 forms covering 2012 through 2016. For more data collection details, see our Methodology here. Data cleaning details can be found here.

We then cleaned, analyzed and compiled the data by department to get a better look at what departments were using the most force, what type of force they were using, and who they were using it on. The result, our searchable database, can be found at NJ.com/force. But we wanted to make department-level results — our aggregate data — available in another way to the broader public.

Below you'll find two files:

• UOF_BY_DEPARTMENTS.csv, with every department's summary data, including the State Police. (This is important to note because the State Police patrols multiple towns and may not be comparable to other departments.)
• UOF_STATEWIDE.csv, a statewide summary of the same data.

For more details on individual columns, see the data dictionary for UOF_BY_DEPARTMENTS. We have also created sample SQL queries to make it easy for users to quickly find their town or county.

It's important to note that these forms were self-reported by police officers, sometimes filled out by hand, so even our data cleaning can't totally prevent inaccuracies from cropping up. We've also included comparisons to population data (from the Census) and arrest data (from the FBI Uniform Crime Report), to try to help give context to what you're seeing.

What about the form-level data?

We have included individual incidents on each department page, but we are not publishing the form-level data freely to the public. Not only is that data extremely dirty and difficult to analyze — at least, it took us six months — but it contains private information about subjects of force, including minors and people with mental health issues. However, we are planning to make a version of that file available upon request in the future.

Data analysis FAQ

What are rows? What are incidents?
Every time any police officer uses force against a subject, they must fill out a form detailing what happened and what force they used. But sometimes multiple police officers used force against the same subject in the same incident. "Rows" are individual forms officers filled out, "incidents" are unique incidents based on the incident number and date.

What are the odds ratios, and how did you calculate them?
We wanted a simple way of showing readers the disparity between black and white subjects in a particular town. So we used an odds ratio, a statistical method often used in research to compare the odds of one thing happening to another. For population, the calculation was (Number of black subjects/Total black population of area)/(Number of white subjects/Total white population of area). For arrests, the calculation was (Number of black subjects/Total number of black arrests in area)/(Number of white subjects/Total number of white arrests in area). In addition, when we compared anything to arrests, we took out all incidents where the subject was an EDP (emotionally disturbed person).

What are the NYC/LA/Chicago warning systems?
Those three departments each look at use of force to flag officers if they show concerning patterns, as way to select those that could merit more training or other action by the department. We compared our data to those three systems to see how many officers would trigger the early warning systems for each. Here are the three systems: - In New York City, officers are flagged for review if they use higher levels of force — including a baton, Taser or firearm, but not pepper spray — or if anyone was injured or hospitalized. We calculated this number by identifying every officer who met one or more of the criteria. - In Los Angeles, officers are compared with one another based on 14 variables, including use of force. If an officer ranks significantly higher than peers for any of the variables — technically, 3 standards of deviation from the norm — supervisors are automatically notified. We calculated this number conservatively by using only use of force as a variable over the course of a calendar year. - In Chicago, officers are flagged for review if force results in an injury or hospitalization, or if the officer uses any level of force above punches or kicks. We calculated this number by identifying every officer who met one or more of the criteria.

What are the different levels of force?
Each officer was required to include in the form what type of force they used against a subject. We cleaned and standardized the data to major categories, although officers could write-in a different type of force if they wanted to. Here are the major categories: - Compliance hold: A compliance hold is a painful maneuver using pressure points to gain control over a suspect. It is the lowest level of force and the most commonly used. But it is often used in conjunction with other types of force. - Takedown: This technique is used to bring a suspect to the ground and eventually onto their stomach to cuff them. It can be a leg sweep or a tackle. - Hands/fist: Open hands or closed fist strikes/punches. - Leg strikes: Leg strikes are any kick or knee used on a subject. - Baton: Officers are trained to use a baton when punches or kicks are unsuccessful. - Pepper spray: Police pepper spray, a mist derived from the resin of cayenne pepper, is considered “mechanical force” under state guidelines. - Deadly force: The firing of an officer's service weapon, regardless of whether a subject was hit. “Warning shots” are prohibited, and officers are instructed not to shoot just to maim or subdue a suspect.