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.

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.

WORKING PAPER. ABSTRACT: By 2016, ongoing police shootings of unarmed black men had increased public awareness of policing processes; chief among those was militarization. Prior researchers explored this relatively new process, but very few had systematically analyzed it. In this paper, I conceptualize, operationalize, and describe police militarization across the United States. I transformed publicly available data, the Law Enforcement and Administrative Statistics (LEMAS) dataset, into a panel of over 4,000 police departments over an eighteen-year period. I then constructed an index based on each of three dimensions of militarization: (1) increased stock of military equipment; (2) increased usage of paramilitary tactics; and (3) increased focus on military-style policing. I explain the indicators within each sub dimension, and describe their unique trend across time. Using both this Absolute LEMAS Militarization Index (ALMI) and a summary analysis of each indicator, I describe militarization between 1990 and 2007 using hierarchical linear modeling. Among key findings are three trends. First, I provide nationally representative evidence of an increasing trend in police militarization across most departments, despite statistical controls. I also found that larger departments were both more militarized and militarized faster over time than smaller departments. Finally, I found that diverse departments (either proportionately more women or more black officers) militarized at a slower rate over the period. This paper provides the theoretical and methodological basis for follow-up analyses of processes affecting militarization, including variations in crime control, organizational characteristics and racial dynamics.

This data set illustrates the ranking of military size by countries across the globe. The value of -1 means that no data was available. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_size_of_armed_forces August 27, 2007