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 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.

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.

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 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.

The Black Lives Matter movement evolved as a protest against police brutality against unarmed Black men. This book extends beyond police brutality to revolutionize the national conversation about racial injustice and inequality and advocate for freedom and justice for all Black Americans. This multi-contributor anthology addresses a range of hot button issues and racial disparities that disproportionately impact the Black community. This call to action will challenge you to confront your long-held values and beliefs about Black lives and confront your own white privilege and fragility as you examine racial justice and equality in a revolutionary way. The data are composed of essay/transcripts. Click on the "request access" option next to each file, to request access to the data.

As of October 22, police in the United States had shot 23 unarmed people to death in 2024. The most common weapon for a victim of a fatal police shooting to be carrying is a gun. In 2023, 717 people carrying a gun were shot and killed by the U.S. police.

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.

Number of observations by time period, applicant race, gender, and prior profession.

Linear probability models of employer responsiveness to job applications, by time period and applicant race.

Browse and search the only comprehensive record of worldwide Black Lives Matter demonstrations.

Items assessing attitudes about police and standardized factor loadings for each wave.

Between April 2022 and March 2023, there were 24.5 stop and searches for every 1,000 black people in England and Wales. There were 5.9 for every 1,000 white people.

Background

In the wake of a nationwide controversy over policing, we've decided to study one of the largest police departments in the United States: the Chicago Police Department (CPD). Thanks to the Invisible Institute, a non-profit journalism organization, we acquired and analyzed comprehensive data on police brutality in Chicago. However, there is still much to consider:

What effects do education, income, and marital status have on crime rates and policing patterns? Is the CPD allocating its resources in the most effective manner? Who are the people being policed?

With detailed demographic data, we can more confidently explore these difficult questions.

Content (to be expanded)

A beat is a subdivision of a police district. See more here and here

General Data

beatpop.txt: population and square mileage

beathh.txt: number of households

Demographic Data

beatage.txt: populations of age groups

beatrace.txt: populations of ethnic groups

Socioeconomic Data

beathi.txt: average median household income

beatfs.txt: number on food stamps

Educational Data

beatea.txt: number with bachelor's, HS diploma, and none

beatse.txt: number enrolled in some school by age

Even Lines > 1: beat name Odd Lines > 1: White, Hispanic, Black, Asian, Mixed, Other populations

Median Household Income

beathi.txt

Lines > 1: beat name, average median household income

Population Living on Food Stamps

beatfs.txt

Lines > 1: beat name, number living on food stamps

Methods

We acquired 2 GeoJSON files describing block group and beat boundaries. Using each geographical division has its distinct benefit: block groups have corresponding census data; beats are used in police records.

We then created two 10,000x10,000 arrays of strings, one for each division, where each position (or pixel) represents a 13.8x13.8 ft region of Chicago, and each string assigns that pixel to its block group / beat. The scalings for the two arrays are the same, meaning that pixel (x, y) in the block group array is geographically identical to (x, y) in the beat array.

https://www.googleapis.com/download/storage/v1/b/kaggle-user-content/o/inbox%2F1718624%2F30d6995d49d129bf86f0a7a20541721e%2Fbgs.png?generation=1595103318202402&alt=media%20=500x500" alt=""> https://www.googleapis.com/download/storage/v1/b/kaggle-user-content/o/inbox%2F1718624%2Fedadcf95d70d3ace473dab02fc440255%2Fbeats.png?generation=1595103442331258&alt=media%20=500x500" alt=""> Each 10,000x10,000 array converted to an image, with each division receiving a unique color. Block groups (L), beats (R)

We scraped each block group's demographic data from [3]. Under the simplifying assumption that any two pixels within the same block group have the same data, we "distributed" each block group's data among its constituent pixels. Lastly, we calculated the data for each beat by "summing up" the data of its constituent pixels.

Caveats

1) The above procedure of "distributing" and "summing up" data, which enables the conversion from block groups to beats, is an approximation. However, since beats are much larger than block groups (as can be seen in the above maps), we have sufficient reason to trust the accuracy of this approximation method. See the Accuracy section for more details.

2) The CPD has made slight changes to its beat boundaries over the years. The beats described in this dataset are up-to-date. This data still can be used with older police records, but with minor hiccups for a few beats.

Accuracy

The main cause of errors in our data is the imperfect overlapping between block group and beat boundaries. Such overlapping is broken into 2 groups: 1) those along Chicago's boundaries; and 2) those within Chicago's boundaries.

We checked for the impact of 1) by "adding up" the estimated data for each beat and cross-referencing them to Chicago's totals (e.g. adding every beat's population, and comparing the sum to Chicago's population). Since many block groups straddle Chicago's borders, how well our approximation algorithm handles their data determines the accuracy of our totals. We calculated percentage errors between our totals and those from [3], finding that none exceeded 2% (see ERRORLOG.txt for more details). Thus, our data is, for the large part, clear of errors caused by 1).

Since inaccuracies committed by our algorithm within Chicago's boundaries have no impact on our totals, the above method can't find any inaccuracies caused by 2). Indeed, since there exists no official demographic data for beats, it's probably impossible to precisely check for this. The best we could do was to create map...

Correlations, standardized regression coefficients, and 95% confidence intervals for associations between pro-police attitudes random intercept factor and time-invariant predictors.

This special topic poll, fielded April 1-5, 2000, queried residents of New York State on the prospective Senate race between First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton and New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani in 2000, and on a range of other political and social issues. Respondents were asked to give their opinions of President Bill Clinton, New York State governor George Pataki, Hillary Clinton, Rudolph Giuliani, and civil rights activist Al Sharpton. Regarding the upcoming Senate race, respondents were asked how much attention they were paying to the upcoming election, for whom they would vote, whether that decision was firm, and who they thought would win. Respondents were also asked which of the potential candidates cared more about people like the respondent, whether the candidates cared about the needs and problems of Black people, and whether the candidates were trying to bring together or divide various groups of New Yorkers. Respondents were asked whether they approved or disapproved of the way Giuliani was handling his job as mayor, and the way he was handling crime, education, and race relations. Regarding Mrs. Clinton, respondents were asked whether they approved of the way she was handling her role as First Lady. Opinions were also elicited on whether Hillary Clinton and Giuliani were spending more time explaining what they would do as senator or attacking each other. Respondents were asked to rate the performance of the New York City police department, whether the police should interfere in individuals' freedoms to make the city safer, and if the respondent had ever been insulted by an officer, felt in personal danger from a police officer, or felt safer because of a police officer. Other questions focused on whether racial profiling was widespread in New York City, whether racial profiling was justified, whether respondents had personally been racially profiled, and if the police favored whites over Blacks or Blacks over whites. In relation to the police shooting death of Patrick Dorismond, an unarmed Black male, outside of a Manhattan bar, respondents were asked how closely they had been following the shooting, how common brutality by the New York City police department against minorities was, how the policies of the Giuliani administration affected the amount of police brutality in New York City, whether the officer involved in the Dorismond shooting should face criminal charges, and whether the public comments made by Giuliani, Hillary Clinton, and Sharpton regarding the shooting made the situation better or worse. Background information on respondents includes voter registration and participation history, political party, political orientation, marital status, religion, education, age, sex, race, Hispanic descent, and family income.

This data set contains New York City Police Department provided domestic violence incident data for calendar years 2020, 2021 and 2022. In addition, ENDGBV obtained through Open Data the number of shooting incidents for calendar years 2020, 2021 and 2022. The data includes counts of the number of domestic violence incidents, shooting incidents and the number of expected domestic violence incidents and shooting incidents by: race (American Indian/Alaska Native, Asian/Pacific Islander, Black, and White) and sex (male, female) for New York City, each borough (Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens and Staten Island). It also provides the count and rate of domestic violence and shooting incidents by police precinct. The expected number of domestic violence incidents and shooting incidents were calculated by taking the total number of actual domestic violence and shooting incidents for a given geography (New York City, the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens and Staten Island) and proportioning them by demographic breakdown of the geographic area.

BackgroundThe United States is experiencing a continuing crisis of gun violence, and economically marginalized and racially segregated inner-city areas are among the most affected. To decrease this violence, public health interventions must engage with the complex social factors and structural drivers—especially with regard to the clandestine sale of narcotics—that have turned the neighborhood streets of specific vulnerable subgroups into concrete killing fields. Here we present a mixed-methods ethnographic and epidemiological assessment of narcotics-driven firearm violence in Philadelphia’s impoverished, majority Puerto Rican neighborhoods.MethodsUsing an exploratory sequential study design, we formulated hypotheses about ethnic/racial vulnerability to violence, based on half a dozen years of intensive participant-observation ethnographic fieldwork. We subsequently tested them statistically, by combining geo-referenced incidents of narcotics- and firearm-related crime from the Philadelphia police department with census information representing race and poverty levels. We explored the racialized relationships between poverty, narcotics, and violence, melding ethnography, graphing, and Poisson regression.FindingsEven controlling for poverty levels, impoverished majority-Puerto Rican areas in Philadelphia are exposed to significantly higher levels of gun violence than majority-white or black neighborhoods. Our mixed methods data suggest that this reflects the unique social position of these neighborhoods as a racial meeting ground in deeply segregated Philadelphia, which has converted them into a retail endpoint for the sale of astronomical levels of narcotics.ImplicationsWe document racial/ethnic and economic disparities in exposure to firearm violence and contextualize them ethnographically in the lived experience of community members. The exceptionally concentrated and high-volume retail narcotics trade, and the violence it generates in Philadelphia’s poor Puerto Rican neighborhoods, reflect unique structural vulnerability and cultural factors. For most young people in these areas, the narcotics economy is the most readily accessible form of employment and social mobility. The performance of violence is an implicit part of survival in these lucrative, illegal narcotics markets, as well as in the overcrowded jails and prisons through which entry-level sellers cycle chronically. To address the structural drivers of violence, an inner-city Marshall Plan is needed that should include well-funded formal employment programs, gun control, re-training police officers to curb the routinization of brutality, reform of criminal justice to prioritize rehabilitation over punishment, and decriminalization of narcotics possession and low-level sales.

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.

In the year ending March 2020, an estimated 773,000 people in England and Wales were sexually assaulted. These types of crimes have lasting effects on victims’ mental health, including depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder. There is a large body of literature which identifies several factors associated with the likelihood of the victim reporting a sexual assault to the police, and these differences may be due to rape myth stereotypes which perpetuate the belief that rape is only “real” under certain conditions. Less is known, however, about the effect these rape myths and stereotypes have on the investigation process itself and the subsequent police outcomes assigned to sex offences. This study aimed to address this gap, providing a profile of all RASSO (rape and serious sexual offences) committed over a 3-year period in one English police force, the police outcomes of these offences, and whether any offences, suspect, or victim variables were associated with different outcomes, in particular the decision to charge or cases where victims decline to prosecute. In line with previous research, the majority of victims were female while the majority of suspects were male, and the most frequent victim–suspect relationship was acquaintance, followed by partner/ex-partner. Charge outcomes were more likely in SSOs and less in rape offences, more likely with stranger offences and less likely than offences committed by partners/ex-partners and relatives, and some non-white suspects were more likely to be charged than suspects of other ethnicities, including white suspects. Victim attrition was more likely in cases where the suspect was a partner or ex-partner and least likely where the suspect was a stranger, more likely in SSOs than in rape cases, and more likely when the victim ethnicity was “other”. Law enforcement should be aware of the potential biases, both relating to rape myths and stereotypes and to the biased treatment of victims and suspects based on demographic characteristics, and work to eliminate these to ensure a fairer and more effective RASSO investigative process.