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 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.

In 2023/24, the police in England and Wales fatally shot two people, compared with three in the previous reporting year, and six in 2016/17. During the same reporting year, the police used firearms twice, compared with ten times in 2022/23. In general, the police in England and Wales and in the rest of the UK do not have a tradition of carrying firearms, with the country having some of the strictest gun laws in the world. In 2023/24, out of around 147,746 police officers, just 5,861 were licensed to carry firearms in England and Wales. Comparisons with the United States Among developed economies, the United States is something of an outlier when it comes to police shootings. In 2024, it is estimated that the police in the United States fatally shot 1,173 people. There are also significant disparities based on a person's ethnicity. Between 2015 and March 2024, the rate of fatal police shootings among Black Americans was 6.1 per one million people, 2.7 per million people for Hispanic Americans and 2.4 per million people for white Americans. Gun violence overall is also far more prevalent in the United States, with 42 percent of American households owning a firearm as of 2023. Gun homicides rare in England and Wales Of the 583 homicides that took place in England and Wales in 2023/24, just 22 were committed by a person using a firearm. By far the most common method of killing was using a knife or other sharp instrument, at 262 homicides, or around 46 percent of them. Compared with twenty years ago, homicides in England and Wales have declined, falling from 1,047 in 2002/03, to just 533 in 2014/15. After this point, annual homicides rose, and by 2016/17 there were more than 700 homicides recorded in England and Wales. Although there have been some fluctuations, particularly during 2020/21 at the height of COVID-19 lockdowns.

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.

"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 w...

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.

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.

The graph illustrates the number of people killed by police in the United States from 2015 to 2024. The x-axis represents the years, spanning from 2015 to 2024, while the y-axis indicates the annual number of deaths. Over this 10-year period, the number of deaths increases from 995 in 2015 to a peak of 1,173 in 2024. Notable figures include 959 deaths in 2016, 1,050 in 2021, and an estimated 1,164 deaths in 2023. The data shows a general upward trend in police-related fatalities from 2015 through 2024. This information is presented in a line graph format, effectively highlighting the yearly changes and overall increase in deaths caused by police actions in the United States, with an anticipated decline in the most recent year.

The Uniform Crime Reporting Program Data, Police Employee Data, 2020 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.

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.

Records of Officer Involved Shootings (OIS) from 2005 to the present, including a brief narrative synopsis. Beginning in Q3 2023, the summary will be replaced with a link to the FRB findings documented, prepared for public release. A link for each OIS will be embedded in the file. Data set does not contain records from active investigations. Data is visualized in a dashboard on the SPD public site (https://www.seattle.gov/police/information-and-data/use-of-force-data/officer-involved-shootings-dashboard), please reference as a guide for use. Dashboard is available for download. Updates are posted twice a year (January and July), as cases complete the inquest process (https://kingcounty.gov/services/inquest-program.aspx). Use of force data also available here: https://data.seattle.gov/Public-Safety/Use-Of-Force/ppi5-g2bj and is updated daily. Data includes Type III - OIS.

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.

This is a set of csv files including a number of variables including fatal police shootings and other crime and socioeconomic covariates at different levels of geographical aggregation from 2013-2016. Five of the files use only the Washington Post data covering years 2015 and 2016, whereas the other five files utilize fatal police shootings of civilians for years 2013-2016, combining the Lott & Moody (2016) data for years 2013-2015 and Washington Post data for 2016. Other variables are included from the American Community Survey (ACS), the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports (UCR), the Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics (LEMAS), Stanford Education Data Archive (SEDA), the US Census, and the Local Area Unemployment Statistics (LAUS) provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The base file is the county-level data. The two files labelled "tenk" consist of regions with at least 10,000 residents. Counties with fewer than 10,000 residents are combined with adjacent counties, ranked by population in ascending order, so that counties with fewer than 10,000 residents are iteratively combined with adjacent neighbors with the fewest residents until they reach the threshold of 10,000 residents. The same algorithm is used to produce regions with 100,000 and 1 million residents. The final two files are state-level aggregations.

This dataset provides information on shooting victims within the city, including incidents involving police officers. It tracks both the victims of shootings and the circumstances surrounding police-involved shootings, offering a comprehensive overview of shooting-related incidents across the city. The data is updated annually to reflect the most recent cases.

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 graph illustrates the total number of people killed by police in the United States from 2015 to 2024, categorized by race. The x-axis represents different racial groups: White, Black, Hispanic, and Other. The y-axis shows the number of deaths. White individuals account for the highest number of fatalities with 4,647 deaths, followed by Black individuals with 2,479 deaths. Hispanic individuals have 1,716 deaths, while the Other category records the lowest number of deaths at 378. The data highlights that White individuals experience the most police-related fatalities over the ten-year period, with significant numbers also affecting Black and Hispanic communities. This distribution underscores the disparities in police-related deaths among different racial groups in the U.S.

In 2015, The Post began tracking details about each police-involved killing in the United States — 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 manually culling local news reports, collecting information from law enforcement websites and social media, and monitoring independent databases such as Fatal Encounters and the now-defunct Killed by Police project. In many cases, The Post conducts additional reporting.

In 2022, The Post updated its database to standardize and publish the names of the police agencies involved in each shooting to better measure accountability at the department level.

The 2014 killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. began a protest movement culminating in the Black Lives Matter movement and an increased focus on police accountability nationwide. In this data set, The Post tracks only shootings with circumstances closely paralleling those like the killing of Brown — incidents in which a police officer, in the line of duty, shoots and kills a civilian. The Post is not tracking deaths of people in police custody, fatal shootings by off-duty officers or non-shooting deaths in this data set.

The FBI and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention log fatal shootings by police, but officials acknowledge that their data is incomplete. Since 2015, The Post has documented more than twice as many fatal shootings by police as recorded by federal officials on average annually. That gap has widened in recent years, as the FBI in 2021 tracked only a third of departments’ fatal shootings.

The Post seeks to make records as comprehensive as possible; the database is updated regularly as fatal shootings are reported and as facts emerge about individual cases. At times, there may be a lag between the date of the shooting and its inclusion in the database because of delays in reporting and data verification.

To provide information about fatal police shootings since Jan. 1, 2015, send us an email at policeshootingsfeedback@washpost.com.

A comprehensive database of fatal police shootings in the United States, compiled and maintained by The Washington Post since January 2015. Updated regularly to track every fatal shooting by an on-duty police officer. Key Highlights: - Source: The Washington Post investigative database - Period: January 2015 – present (regularly updated) - Records: Every documented fatal police shooting by on-duty officers - Variables: Victim demographics, circumstances, weapon involvement, case status, location - Purpose: Accountability and transparency in policing PROJECT DESCRIPTION The Washington Post created this database to increase accountability of police agencies by systematically documenting fatal shooting incidents. Data is compiled from news reports, public records, social media, and law enforcement websites. Research Applications: - Policing practices and use-of-force analysis - Racial disparities in law enforcement outcomes - Temporal and spatial trends in police shootings - Public safety policy reform evaluation Subject Terms: police shootings, use of force, law enforcement, racial disparities, public safety, policing, United States

Bloomington Police Department cases where officers have fired a gun at an individual. Key code for Race: A- Asian/Pacific Island, Non-Hispanic B- African American, Non-Hispanic C- Hawaiian/Other Pacific Island, Hispanic H- Hawaiian/Other Pacific Island, Non-Hispanic I- Indian/Alaskan Native, Non-Hispanic K- African American, Hispanic L- Caucasian, Hispanic N- Indian/Alaskan Native, Hispanic P- Asian/Pacific Island, Hispanic S- Asian, Non-Hispanic T- Asian, Hispanic U- Unknown W- Caucasian, Non-Hispanic Key Code for Reading Districts: Example: LB519 L for Law call or incident B stands for Bloomington 5 is the district or beat where incident occurred All numbers following represents a grid sector. Disclaimer: The Bloomington Police Department takes great effort in making open data as accurate as possible, but there is no avoiding the introduction of errors in this process, which relies on data provided by many people and that cannot always be verified. Information contained in this dataset may change over a period of time. The Bloomington Police Department is not responsible for any error or omission from this data, or for the use or interpretation of the results of any research conducted.