The Uniform Crime Reporting Program Data, Police Employee Data, 2014 file contains monthly data on felonious or accidental killings and assaults upon United States law enforcement officers acting in the line of duty. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) assembled the data and processed them from UCR Master Police Employee (LEOKA) data tapes. Each agency record in the file includes the following summary variables: state code, population group code, geographic division, Metropolitan Statistical Area code, and agency name. These variables afford considerable flexibility in creating subsets or aggregations of the data. Since 1930, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has compiled the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) to serve as a periodic nationwide assessment of reported crimes not available elsewhere in the criminal justice system. Each year, this information is reported in four types of files: (1) Offenses Known and Clearances by Arrest, (2) Property Stolen and Recovered, (3) Supplementary Homicide Reports (SHR), and (4) Police Employee (LEOKA) Data. The Police Employee (LEOKA) Data provide information about law enforcement officers killed or assaulted (hence the acronym, LEOKA) in the line of duty. The variables created from the LEOKA forms provide in-depth information on the circumstances surrounding killings or assaults, including type of call answered, type of weapon used, and type of patrol the officers were on.

This data collection was undertaken to gather information on the extent of police officers' knowledge of search and seizure law, an issue with important consequences for law enforcement. A specially-produced videotape depicting line duty situations that uniformed police officers frequently encounter was viewed by 478 line uniformed police officers from 52 randomly-selected cities in which search and seizure laws were determined to be no more restrictive than applicable United States Supreme Court decisions. Testing of the police officers occurred in all regions as established by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, except for the Pacific region (California, Oregon, and Washington), since search and seizure laws in these states are, in some instances, more restrictive than United States Supreme Court decisions. No testing occurred in cities with populations under 10,000 because of budget limitations. Fourteen questions to which the officers responded were presented in the videotape. Each police officer also completed a questionnaire that included questions on demographics, training, and work experience, covering their age, sex, race, shift worked, years of police experience, education, training on search and seizure law, effectiveness of various types of training instructors and methods, how easily they could obtain advice about search and seizure questions they encountered, and court outcomes of search and seizure cases in which they were involved. Police department representatives completed a separate questionnaire providing department characteristics and information on search and seizure training and procedures, such as the number of sworn officers, existence of general training and the number of hours required, existence of in-service search and seizure training and the number of hours and testing required, existence of policies and procedures on search and seizure, and means of advice available to officers about search and seizure questions. These data comprise Part 1. For purposes of comparison and interpretation of the police officer test scores, question responses were also obtained from other sources. Part 2 contains responses from 36 judges from states with search and seizure laws no more restrictive than the United States Supreme Court decisions, as well as responses from a demographic and work-experience questionnaire inquiring about their age, law school attendance, general judicial experience, and judicial experience and education specific to search and seizure laws. All geographic regions except New England and the Pacific were represented by the judges. Part 3, Comparison Data, contains answers to the 14 test questions only, from 15 elected district attorneys, 6 assistant district attorneys, the district attorney in another city and 11 of his assistant district attorneys, a police attorney with expertise in search and seizure law, 24 police academy trainees with no previous police work experience who were tested before search and seizure law training, a second group of 17 police academy trainees -- some with police work experience but no search and seizure law training, 55 law enforcement officer trainees from a third academy tested immediately after search and seizure training, 7 technical college students with no previous education or training on search and seizure law, and 27 university criminal justice course students, also with no search and seizure law education or training.

Analysis of ‘Police Killings US’ provided by Analyst-2 (analyst-2.ai), based on source dataset retrieved from https://www.kaggle.com/azizozmen/police-killings-us on 13 February 2022.

--- Dataset description provided by original source is as follows ---

"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 was wearing a body camera and it may have recorded some portion of the incident.

SOURCE

--- Original source retains full ownership of the source dataset ---

This data collection was designed to assess the impact of line-of-duty deaths of law enforcement officers on their family members in terms of the psychological, emotional, and financial effects. To assess the impact of the traumatic event, a wide variety of clinical and psychiatric measures of psychological disorder were employed. The data are stored in two files. Included in the first file are variables concerning the respondent's personal characteristics such as age, sex, ethnic origin, marital status, educational level, relationship to deceased officer, and employment. Also included are experiences and emotional reactions to the death of the officer and clinical symptoms of psychological distress. The file also offers information on the deceased officer's demographic characteristics such as age at time of death, sex, ethnic origin, educational level, number of times married, and number of years in law enforcement, as well as the date and time of the incident. The second file contains variables on the respondent's relationship with friends and relatives before and after the traumatic event, behavioral changes of survivors' children following the death, financial impacts on survivors, and satisfaction with treatment and responses received from police departments.

Since 1930, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has compiled the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) to serve as a periodic nationwide assessment of reported crimes not available elsewhere in the criminal justice system. Each year, this information is reported in four types of files: (1) Offenses Known and Clearances by Arrest, (2) Property Stolen and Recovered, (3) Supplementary Homicide Reports (SHR), and (4) Police Employee (LEOKA) Data. The Police Employee (LEOKA) Data provide information about law enforcement officers killed or assaulted (hence the acronym, LEOKA) in the line of duty. The variables created from the LEOKA forms provide in-depth information on the circumstances surrounding killings or assaults, including type of call answered, type of weapon used, and type of patrol the officers were on.

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

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.

Version 4 release notes: Add data for 2016.Order rows by year (descending) and ORI.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 Star of Texas Award honors Texas peace officer, firefighters, emergency medical first responders, and federal law enforcement officers who are seriously injured or killed in the line of duty. Private Citizens who where seriously injured or killed while aiding or attempting to aid a peace officer, firefighter, or emergency first responder in the performance of their duties are also eligible to receive a Star of Texas Award. This dataset lists the recipients of the Star of Texas Award between 2004 and 2019.

Since 1930, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has compiled the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) to serve as periodic nationwide assessments of reported crimes not available elsewhere in the criminal justice system. By 1985, there were approximately 17,000 law enforcement agencies contributing reports either directly or through their state reporting programs. Each year, this information is reported in four types of files: (1) Offenses Known and Clearances by Arrest, (2) Property Stolen and Recovered, (3) Supplementary Homicide Reports (SHR), and (4) Police Employee (LEOKA) Data. Offenses Known and Clearances by Arrest data files include monthly data on the number of Crime Index offenses reported and the number of offenses cleared by arrest or other means. The counts include all reports of Index Crimes (excluding arson) received from victims, officers who discovered infractions, or other sources. The Property Stolen and Recovered data are collected on a monthly basis by all UCR contributing agencies. These data, aggregated at the agency level, report on the nature of the crime, the monetary value of the property stolen, and the type of property stolen. Similar information regarding recovered property is also included in the data. The Supplementary Homicide Reports provide incident-based information on criminal homicides. Further, the data, provided monthly by UCR agencies, contain information describing the victim of the homicide, the offender, and the relationship between victim and offender. The Police Employee (LEOKA) Data provide information about law enforcement officers killed or assaulted (hence the acronym, LEOKA) in the line of duty. The variables created from the LEOKA forms provide in-depth information on the circumstances surrounding killings or assaults, including type of call answered, type of weapon used, and type of patrol the officers were on.