In 2023, ** offenders who killed law enforcement officers in the United States were of an unknown race or their race was not reported to the FBI. ** white offenders and ** Black offenders also killed law enforcement officers in that year. From the total of known offenders that year, ** were male.

In 2023, the majority of law enforcement officers that were killed in the United States were white. That year, ** white law enforcement officers as well as **** Black officers were killed. Overall, a total of ** law enforcement officers were killed in the United States in that year.

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 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.

This data was obtained from https://mappingpoliceviolence.us/.

Mapping Police Violence is a 501(c)(3) organization that publishes the most comprehensive and up-to-date data on police violence in America to support transformative change.

This is a database set on openly sharing information on police violence in America.

Some information on this data according to their website: Our data has been meticulously sourced from official police use of force data collection programs in states like California, Texas and Virginia, combined with nationwide data from The Gun Violence Archive and the Fatal Encounters database, two impartial crowdsourced databases. We've also done extensive original research to further improve the quality and completeness of the data; searching social media, obituaries, criminal records databases, police reports and other sources to identify the race of 90 percent of all victims in the database.

We believe the data represented on this site is the most comprehensive accounting of people killed by police since 2013. Note that the Mapping Police Violence database is more comprehensive than the Washington Post police shootings database: while WaPo only tracks cases where people are fatally shot by on-duty police officers, our database includes additional incidents such as cases where police kill someone through use of a chokehold, baton, taser or other means as well as cases such as killings by off-duty police. A recent report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics estimated approximately 1,200 people were killed by police between June, 2015 and May, 2016. Our database identified 1,100 people killed by police over this time period. While there are undoubtedly police killings that are not included in our database (namely, those that go unreported by the media), these estimates suggest that our database captures 92% of the total number of police killings that have occurred since 2013. We hope these data will be used to provide greater transparency and accountability for police departments as part of the ongoing work to end police violence in America.

As of November 17, 277 Black people were killed by the police in the United States in 2024. This compares to 201 Hispanic people and 445 white people. The rate of police shootings of Black Americans is much higher than any other ethnicity, at 6.2 per million people. This rate stands at 2.8 per million for Hispanic people and 2.4 per million for white people.

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 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 the provided time period, the most people killed by police in the United States was in 2024, at 1,375 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.

A geographically-resolved, multi-level Bayesian model is used to analyze the data presented in the U.S. Police-Shooting Database (USPSD) in order to investigate the extent of racial bias in the shooting of American civilians by police officers in recent years. In contrast to previous work that relied on the FBI’s Supplemental Homicide Reports that were constructed from self-reported cases of police-involved homicide, this data set is less likely to be biased by police reporting practices. County-specific relative risk outcomes of being shot by police are estimated as a function of the interaction of: 1) whether suspects/civilians were armed or unarmed, and 2) the race/ethnicity of the suspects/civilians. The results provide evidence of a significant bias in the killing of unarmed black Americans relative to unarmed white Americans, in that the probability of being {black, unarmed, and shot by police} is about 3.49 times the probability of being {white, unarmed, and shot by police} on average. Furthermore, the results of multi-level modeling show that there exists significant heterogeneity across counties in the extent of racial bias in police shootings, with some counties showing relative risk ratios of 20 to 1 or more. Finally, analysis of police shooting data as a function of county-level predictors suggests that racial bias in police shootings is most likely to emerge in police departments in larger metropolitan counties with low median incomes and a sizable portion of black residents, especially when there is high financial inequality in that county. There is no relationship between county-level racial bias in police shootings and crime rates (even race-specific crime rates), meaning that the racial bias observed in police shootings in this data set is not explainable as a response to local-level crime rates.

This dataset is one of three that pull together data from several different sources regarding police-related violence and racial equity in the United States. The datasets currently include these types of data:

Part 1: Citizen deaths, police deaths, and other outcomes - Police shootings - Citizen fatalities involving police - Police officer deaths suffered in the line of duty

Part 2: Demographics, crime stats, protests, and other data - Social and economic data - Political leanings of citizens - Sales of DoD equipment to law enforcement agencies - City budgets - Police department headcounts - Police department policies and contract provisions - Juvenile arrests by type of crime and race - Crimes and arrests for the prime city in the four largest metro areas. - Protest activity - Police response - Press activity - Video clips of incidents

I don't believe that any amount of data can fully describe the social dysfunction we have. At the same time, I hope these datasets can be an objective source for providing thoughtful, fact-based analysis of this important issue.

In 2024, approximately ** percent of the police officers killed in Brazil were black. That year, *** police officers died in the South American country.

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 circumstances surrounding "justifiable homicides" by police are the focus of this data collection, which examines occurrences in 57 United States cities during the period 1970-1979. Homicides by on- and off-duty police officers serving communities of 250,000 or more were studied. Data were collected through a survey questionnaire sent to police executives of the 57 cities. The Federal Bureau of Investigation supplied data on justifiable homicides by police, including age, sex, and race data. The variables include number of sworn officers, number of supervisory officers, average years of education, department regulations about issues such as off-duty employment, uniforms, carrying firearms, and disciplinary actions, in-service training, pre-service training, firearms practice, assignments without firearms, on-duty deaths, and off-duty deaths. The study was funded by a grant from the National Institute of Justice to the International Association of Chiefs of Police.

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.

This article presents evidence that exposure to officer-involved deaths of low-threat black victims increases political interest and voter turnout among black CMPS respondents under age 40. The analysis takes advantage of variation in the timing of exposure to officer-involved deaths, relative to survey participation, to randomly assign survey respondents to treatment and control conditions. The analysis considers socioeconomic status, police contact, police performance, and other factors that might confound this relationship. The results reveal that victim race, threat level, and visibility affect the likelihood that an officer-involved death will mobilize political interest. Political interest and voter turnout are higher among the treatment group, who were exposed to high-visibility/low-threat Black victims only before they participated in the CMPS, than in the control group, who were exposed to such victims only after they took the survey. Exposing young black respondents to all victims without accounting for threat, visibility, or race does not affect political interest or voter turnout, suggesting the importance of these factors for mobilization. The findings clarify role that Black Lives Matter activists, journalists, and watchdog groups can play in countering the police actions that shape the visibility and framing of black victims of police violence.

This dataset contains aggregate data on violent index victimizations at the quarter level of each year (i.e., January – March, April – June, July – September, October – December), from 2001 to the present (1991 to present for Homicides), with a focus on those related to gun violence. Index crimes are 10 crime types selected by the FBI (codes 1-4) for special focus due to their seriousness and frequency. This dataset includes only those index crimes that involve bodily harm or the threat of bodily harm and are reported to the Chicago Police Department (CPD). Each row is aggregated up to victimization type, age group, sex, race, and whether the victimization was domestic-related. Aggregating at the quarter level provides large enough blocks of incidents to protect anonymity while allowing the end user to observe inter-year and intra-year variation. Any row where there were fewer than three incidents during a given quarter has been deleted to help prevent re-identification of victims. For example, if there were three domestic criminal sexual assaults during January to March 2020, all victims associated with those incidents have been removed from this dataset. Human trafficking victimizations have been aggregated separately due to the extremely small number of victimizations.

This dataset includes a " GUNSHOT_INJURY_I " column to indicate whether the victimization involved a shooting, showing either Yes ("Y"), No ("N"), or Unknown ("UKNOWN.") For homicides, injury descriptions are available dating back to 1991, so the "shooting" column will read either "Y" or "N" to indicate whether the homicide was a fatal shooting or not. For non-fatal shootings, data is only available as of 2010. As a result, for any non-fatal shootings that occurred from 2010 to the present, the shooting column will read as “Y.” Non-fatal shooting victims will not be included in this dataset prior to 2010; they will be included in the authorized dataset, but with "UNKNOWN" in the shooting column.

The dataset is refreshed daily, but excludes the most recent complete day to allow CPD time to gather the best available information. Each time the dataset is refreshed, records can change as CPD learns more about each victimization, especially those victimizations that are most recent. The data on the Mayor's Office Violence Reduction Dashboard is updated daily with an approximately 48-hour lag. As cases are passed from the initial reporting officer to the investigating detectives, some recorded data about incidents and victimizations may change once additional information arises. Regularly updated datasets on the City's public portal may change to reflect new or corrected information.

How does this dataset classify victims?

The methodology by which this dataset classifies victims of violent crime differs by victimization type:

Homicide and non-fatal shooting victims: A victimization is considered a homicide victimization or non-fatal shooting victimization depending on its presence in CPD's homicide victims data table or its shooting victims data table. A victimization is considered a homicide only if it is present in CPD's homicide data table, while a victimization is considered a non-fatal shooting only if it is present in CPD's shooting data tables and absent from CPD's homicide data table.

To determine the IUCR code of homicide and non-fatal shooting victimizations, we defer to the incident IUCR code available in CPD's Crimes, 2001-present dataset (available on the City's open data portal). If the IUCR code in CPD's Crimes dataset is inconsistent with the homicide/non-fatal shooting categorization, we defer to CPD's Victims dataset.

For a criminal homicide, the only sensible IUCR codes are 0110 (first-degree murder) or 0130 (second-degree murder). For a non-fatal shooting, a sensible IUCR code must signify a criminal sexual assault, a robbery, or, most commonly, an aggravated battery. In rare instances, the IUCR code in CPD's Crimes and Victims dataset do not align with the homicide/non-fatal shooting categorization:

1. In instances where a homicide victimization does not correspond to an IUCR code 0110 or 0130, we set the IUCR code to "01XX" to indicate that the victimization was a homicide but we do not know whether it was a first-degree murder (IUCR code = 0110) or a second-degree murder (IUCR code = 0130).
2. When a non-fatal shooting victimization does not correspond to an IUCR code that signifies a criminal sexual assault, robbery, or aggravated battery, we enter “UNK” in the IUCR column, “YES” in the GUNSHOT_I column, and “NON-FATAL” in the PRIMARY column to indicate that the victim was non-fatally shot, but the precise IUCR code is unknown.

Other violent crime victims: For other violent crime types, we refer to the IUCR classification that exists in CPD's victim table, with only one exception:

1. When there is an incident that is associated with no victim with a matching IUCR code, we assume that this is an error. Every crime should have at least 1 victim with a matching IUCR code. In these cases, we change the IUCR code to reflect the incident IUCR code because CPD's incident table is considered to be more reliable than the victim table.

Note: All businesses identified as victims in CPD data have been removed from this dataset.

Note: The definition of “homicide” (shooting or otherwise) does not include justifiable homicide or involuntary manslaughter. This dataset also excludes any cases that CPD considers to be “unfounded” or “noncriminal.”

Note: In some instances, the police department's raw incident-level data and victim-level data that were inputs into this dataset do not align on the type of crime that occurred. In those instances, this dataset attempts to correct mismatches between incident and victim specific crime types. When it is not possible to determine which victims are associated with the most recent crime determination, the dataset will show empty cells in the respective demographic fields (age, sex, race, etc.).

Note: The initial reporting officer usually asks victims to report demographic data. If victims are unable to recall, the reporting officer will use their best judgment. “Unknown” can be reported if it is truly unknown.

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

In 2023, in Brazil, there were ***** deaths due to police interventions. In that year, around ** percent of the deaths victimized people of black ethnicity.

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 Jan. 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 person 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 conducted additional reporting in many cases.

In 2016, The Post is gathering additional information about each fatal shooting by police 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. Officers’ names are being included in the database after The Post contacts the departments to request comment.

The Post is documenting only those shootings in which a police officer, in the line of duty, shoots and kills 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 twice as many fatal shootings by police as had been recorded by the FBI. Last year, the FBI announced plans to overhaul how it tracks fatal police encounters.

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 since Jan. 1, 2015, send us an email at policeshootingsfeedback@washpost.com. The Post is also interested in obtaining photos of the deceased and original videos of fatal encounters with police.

Data Dictionary

...

Key	List of...	Comment	Example Value
Person.Name	String	Full name of the individual or "Unknown" if not reported	"Tim Elliot"
Person.Age	Integer	Age in years of the individual or 0 (zero) if not reported	53
Person.Gender	String	One of Male, Female, or Unknown	"Male"
Person.Race	String	One of Asian, African American, White, Hispanic, Native American, Other, or Unknown.	"Asian"
Incident.Date.Month	Integer	Month (1-12) in which the shooting occurred	1
Incident.Date.Day	Integer	Day (1-31) in which the shooting occurred	2
Incident.Date.Year	Integer	Year (2015-2019) in which the shooting occurred	2015
Incident.Date.Full	String	Date in which shooting occurred (Year/Month/Day)	"2015/01/02"
Incident.Location.City	String	Name of city in which the shooting occurred	"Shelton"
Incident.Location.State	String	Name of U.S. State in which the shooting occurred	"WA"
Factors.Armed	String	Description of any weapon carried by the person (.e., "gun", "knife", "unarmed"); value is "unknown" if not reported.	"gun"
Factors.Mental-Illness	Boolean	True if factors of mental illness were perceived in the person; False otherwise	True
Factors.Threat-Level	String	Threat of person as perceived by police. One of "attack", "undetermined", or "other"; value is "unknown" if not reported.	"attack"
Factors.Fleeing	String	Means by which person was fleeing (e.g., "Car", "Foot") or "Not fleeing"; value is "unknown" if not reported.	"Not fleeing"
Shooting.Manner

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.