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 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 in 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 this time period, the most people killed by police in the United States was in 2023, at 1,353 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.

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.

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 ---

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.

Police killings dataset (not just shooting, but by any means) is from https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/ that covers the period 2013-2023. This includes the Washington Post (WaPo) dataset on shooting victims.The curated datasets are included here along with a research question and guiding questions.See the codebook for full details.

In the United States, more men than women are shot to death by the police. As of October 22, the U.S. police shot 904 men and 44 women to death in 2024. In 2023, the police shot 1,107 men and 48 women to death.

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.

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.

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

The Shootings dashboard contains information on shooting incidents where a victim was struck by a bullet, either fatally or non-fatally; that occurred in the City of Boston and fall under Boston Police Department jurisdiction. The dashboard does not contain records for self-inflicted gunshot wounds or shootings determined to be justifiable. Information on the incident, and the demographics of victims are included. This information is updated based on analysis conducted by the Boston Regional Intelligence Center under the Boston Police Department Bureau of Intelligence and Analysis. The data is for 2015 forward, with a 7 day rolling delay to allow for analysis and data entry to occur.

Dataset

This dataset was created by Justin Brown

Released under MIT

Contents

Data on armed police encounters in the Philippines from 2006 to 2015 for the National Capital Region, Regions 3, 4a, 4b, 7 and 10. Differentiated by subregional unit and year. Categories: suspects killed, suspects wounded, police officers killed, police officers wounded.

In 2023, 1,190 deadly police shootings occurred in the United States, a slight increase from 1,156 in the previous year. During this same period, there were 322 Black people killed by the police.

This dataset reflects reported incidents of crime (with the exception of murders where data exists for each victim) that occurred in the City of Chicago from 2001 to present, minus the most recent seven days. Data is extracted from the Chicago Police Department's CLEAR (Citizen Law Enforcement Analysis and Reporting) system. In order to protect the privacy of crime victims, addresses are shown at the block level only and specific locations are not identified. Should you have questions about this dataset, you may contact the Research & Development Division of the Chicago Police Department at 312.745.6071 or RandD@chicagopolice.org. Disclaimer: These crimes may be based upon preliminary information supplied to the Police Department by the reporting parties that have not been verified. The preliminary crime classifications may be changed at a later date based upon additional investigation and there is always the possibility of mechanical or human error. Therefore, the Chicago Police Department does not guarantee (either expressed or implied) the accuracy, completeness, timeliness, or correct sequencing of the information and the information should not be used for comparison purposes over time. The Chicago Police Department will not be responsible for any error or omission, or for the use of, or the results obtained from the use of this information. All data visualizations on maps should be considered approximate and attempts to derive specific addresses are strictly prohibited. The Chicago Police Department is not responsible for the content of any off-site pages that are referenced by or that reference this web page other than an official City of Chicago or Chicago Police Department web page. The user specifically acknowledges that the Chicago Police Department is not responsible for any defamatory, offensive, misleading, or illegal conduct of other users, links, or third parties and that the risk of injury from the foregoing rests entirely with the user. The unauthorized use of the words "Chicago Police Department," "Chicago Police," or any colorable imitation of these words or the unauthorized use of the Chicago Police Department logo is unlawful. This web page does not, in any way, authorize such use. Data is updated daily Tuesday through Sunday. The dataset contains more than 65,000 records/rows of data and cannot be viewed in full in Microsoft Excel. Therefore, when downloading the file, select CSV from the Export menu. Open the file in an ASCII text editor, such as Wordpad, to view and search. To access a list of Chicago Police Department - Illinois Uniform Crime Reporting (IUCR) codes, go to http://data.cityofchicago.org/Public-Safety/Chicago-Police-Department-Illinois-Uniform-Crime-R/c7ck-438e

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

This page includes replication code and data for Bor et al "Police killings and their spillover effects on the mental health of black Americans: a population-based, quasi-experimental study" published in the Lancet. The data and code will be provided to coincide with the publication of the print version of the paper.

The data set is refreshed on the last Friday of the month at 7:30 PM. The website will reflect the last time the data set was updated and the total count of rows. The grid on the “Data” tab will display the up to date data. However, in certain situations there is a delay in the refresh of the downloadable data file. Sometimes the downloadable file does not reflect the updates to the data in the portal. After a delay (duration has been variable; up to 30 minutes), the file will be updated on the server and then downloads will include the updated data.

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 ---

Complete replication data for The Impact of Police Killings on Proximal Voter Turnout. If you have any questions, please email gmarkarian@luc.edu