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.

The 2014 killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, began the protest movement culminating in Black Lives Matter and an increased focus on police accountability nationwide.

Since Jan. 1, 2015, The Washington Post has been compiling a database of every fatal shooting in the US by a police officer in the line of duty. It's difficult to find reliable data from before this period, as police killings haven't been comprehensively documented, and the statistics on police brutality are much less available. As a result, a vast number of cases go unreported.

The Washington Post is tracking more than a dozen details about each killing - including the race, age and gender of the deceased, whether the person was armed, and whether the victim was experiencing a mental-health crisis. They have gathered this information from law enforcement websites, local new reports, social media, and by monitoring independent databases such as "Killed by police" and "Fatal Encounters". The Post has also conducted additional reporting in many cases.

There are four additional datasets. These are US census data on poverty rate, high school graduation rate, median household income, and racial demographics.

Source of census data: https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/nav/jsf/pages/community_facts.xhtml

List of every shooting incident that occurred in NYC during the current calendar year.

This is a breakdown of every shooting incident that occurred in NYC during the current calendar year. This data is manually extracted every quarter and reviewed by the Office of Management Analysis and Planning before being posted on the NYPD website. Each record represents a shooting incident in NYC and includes information about the event, the location and time of occurrence. In addition, information related to suspect and victim demographics is also included. This data can be used by the public to explore the nature of police enforcement activity. Please refer to the attached data footnotes for additional information about this dataset.

Analysis of ‘US Police Shootings’ provided by Analyst-2 (analyst-2.ai), based on source dataset retrieved from https://www.kaggle.com/ahsen1330/us-police-shootings on 28 January 2022.

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

Context

In the recent killings, a hot topic came into being, "Racism". So, I chose to gather some data to take out some insights and analyze the story around racism in America. I downloaded the raw data from kaggle and prepared it for visualization while correcting values, handling missing content, normalization and categorization

Content

It contains basic data about people like their name, age, gender and race. Along with it, is the shooting/killing information, like date of event, where it happened? how they were shot? did they attack? Were they holding weapons? Did they show any mental illness? Was the policeman wearing a camera/was the incident recorded? Did the suspect flee? Apart from that, a category column holds type of weapon used by the suspect

Acknowledgements

Kagglers

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

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 as frequently and as promptly as possible.

What is The Counted? 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, 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 as frequently and as promptly as possible.

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.

The Motor Vehicle Collisions crash table contains details on the crash event. Each row represents a crash event. The Motor Vehicle Collisions data tables contain information from all police reported motor vehicle collisions in NYC. The police report (MV104-AN) is required to be filled out for collisions where someone is injured or killed, or where there is at least $1000 worth of damage (https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.dot.gov/files/documents/ny_overlay_mv-104an_rev05_2004.pdf). It should be noted that the data is preliminary and subject to change when the MV-104AN forms are amended based on revised crash details.For the most accurate, up to date statistics on traffic fatalities, please refer to the NYPD Motor Vehicle Collisions page (updated weekly) or Vision Zero View (updated monthly).

Due to success of the CompStat program, NYPD began to ask how to apply the CompStat principles to other problems. Other than homicides, the fatal incidents with which police have the most contact with the public are fatal traffic collisions. Therefore in April 1998, the Department implemented TrafficStat, which uses the CompStat model to work towards improving traffic safety. Police officers complete form MV-104AN for all vehicle collisions. The MV-104AN is a New York State form that has all of the details of a traffic collision. Before implementing Trafficstat, there was no uniform traffic safety data collection procedure for all of the NYPD precincts. Therefore, the Police Department implemented the Traffic Accident Management System (TAMS) in July 1999 in order to collect traffic data in a uniform method across the City. TAMS required the precincts manually enter a few selected MV-104AN fields to collect very basic intersection traffic crash statistics which included the number of accidents, injuries and fatalities. As the years progressed, there grew a need for additional traffic data so that more detailed analyses could be conducted. The Citywide traffic safety initiative, Vision Zero started in the year 2014. Vision Zero further emphasized the need for the collection of more traffic data in order to work towards the Vision Zero goal, which is to eliminate traffic fatalities. Therefore, the Department in March 2016 replaced the TAMS with the new Finest Online Records Management System (FORMS). FORMS enables the police officers to electronically, using a Department cellphone or computer, enter all of the MV-104AN data fields and stores all of the MV-104AN data fields in the Department’s crime data warehouse. Since all of the MV-104AN data fields are now stored for each traffic collision, detailed traffic safety analyses can be conducted as applicable.

This is a subset of a larger dataset. This dataset includes pedestrians and cyclists killed in traffic collisions in 2021.

The Motor Vehicle Collisions person table contains details for people involved in the crash. Each row represents a person (driver, occupant, pedestrian, bicyclist,..) involved in a crash. The data in this table goes back to April 2016 when crash reporting switched to an electronic system.

The Motor Vehicle Collisions data tables contain information from all police reported motor vehicle collisions in NYC. The police report (MV104-AN) is required to be filled out for collisions where someone is injured or killed, or where there is at least $1000 worth of damage (https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.dot.gov/files/documents/ny_overlay_mv-104an_rev05_2004.pdf). It should be noted that the data is preliminary and subject to change when the MV-104AN forms are amended based on revised crash details.

Due to success of the CompStat program, NYPD began to ask how to apply the CompStat principles to other problems. Other than homicides, the fatal incidents with which police have the most contact with the public are fatal traffic collisions. Therefore in April 1998, the Department implemented TrafficStat, which uses the CompStat model to work towards improving traffic safety. Police officers complete form MV-104AN for all vehicle collisions. The MV-104AN is a New York State form that has all of the details of a traffic collision. Before implementing Trafficstat, there was no uniform traffic safety data collection procedure for all of the NYPD precincts. Therefore, the Police Department implemented the Traffic Accident Management System (TAMS) in July 1999 in order to collect traffic data in a uniform method across the City. TAMS required the precincts manually enter a few selected MV-104AN fields to collect very basic intersection traffic crash statistics which included the number of accidents, injuries and fatalities. As the years progressed, there grew a need for additional traffic data so that more detailed analyses could be conducted. The Citywide traffic safety initiative, Vision Zero started in the year 2014. Vision Zero further emphasized the need for the collection of more traffic data in order to work towards the Vision Zero goal, which is to eliminate traffic fatalities. Therefore, the Department in March 2016 replaced the TAMS with the new Finest Online Records Management System (FORMS). FORMS enables the police officers to electronically, using a Department cellphone or computer, enter all of the MV-104AN data fields and stores all of the MV-104AN data fields in the Department’s crime data warehouse. Since all of the MV-104AN data fields are now stored for each traffic collision, detailed traffic safety analyses can be conducted as applicable.

There has been little research on United States homicide rates from a long-term perspective, primarily because there has been no consistent data series on a particular place preceding the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR), which began its first full year in 1931. To fill this research gap, this project created a data series on homicides per capita for New York City that spans two centuries. The goal was to create a site-specific, individual-based data series that could be used to examine major social shifts related to homicide, such as mass immigration, urban growth, war, demographic changes, and changes in laws. Data were also gathered on various other sites, particularly in England, to allow for comparisons on important issues, such as the post-World War II wave of violence. The basic approach to the data collection was to obtain the best possible estimate of annual counts and the most complete information on individual homicides. The annual count data (Parts 1 and 3) were derived from multiple sources, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Uniform Crime Reports and Supplementary Homicide Reports, as well as other official counts from the New York City Police Department and the City Inspector in the early 19th century. The data include a combined count of murder and manslaughter because charge bargaining often blurs this legal distinction. The individual-level data (Part 2) were drawn from coroners' indictments held by the New York City Municipal Archives, and from daily newspapers. Duplication was avoided by keeping a record for each victim. The estimation technique known as "capture-recapture" was used to estimate homicides not listed in either source. Part 1 variables include counts of New York City homicides, arrests, and convictions, as well as the homicide rate, race or ethnicity and gender of victims, type of weapon used, and source of data. Part 2 includes the date of the murder, the age, sex, and race of the offender and victim, and whether the case led to an arrest, trial, conviction, execution, or pardon. Part 3 contains annual homicide counts and rates for various comparison sites including Liverpool, London, Kent, Canada, Baltimore, Los Angeles, Seattle, and San Francisco.

Characteristics of police violence fatalities, 2013–2019.