We Now Know Just How Many People Were Killed by Police This Year

An analysis by ‘The Washington Post’ found the number of shootings was double the rate reported by the federal government.

A boy who lives in the Baltimore neighborhood where Freddie Gray was arrested, and where residents rioted over his death in April, is halted by police tape. (Photo: Jim Bourg/Reuters)

May 31, 2015· 1 MIN READ

Jennifer Swann is TakePart’s culture and lifestyle reporter.

The federal government does not keep comprehensive records of how many Americans are killed by police each year. It’s an omission that came to light in the media last fall after a string of high-profile police shootings, including the officer-involved death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

The Washington Post today released its own analysis, shedding further doubt on the government’s record-keeping skills when it comes to police killings. According to journalists who analyzed police reports, local news accounts, and interviews detailing each incident, 385 people were shot and killed by police around the country between January and May 2015—an average of more than two deaths a day.

That is double the rate of police shootings counted by the federal government over the past decade. The FBI’s Justifiable Homicide Report—which, as its title suggests, only tracks self-reported killings deemed “justifiable”—put the number of police killings at about 400 annually. The Post’s analysis, however, shows roughly the same number of deaths in just five months.

The new findings show that about half the victims were white, and an overwhelming majority were men. Eighty percent were armed with potentially fatal weapons such as guns, knives, or machetes. But the numbers hardly tell the whole story. A deeper look at the data confirms what many activists have long suspected: Minorities and the mentally ill—the latter group accounting for nearly a quarter of all victims—were killed at disproportionately high rates. Among the unarmed victims, two-thirds were black or Hispanic. When Post reporters took into account the population of the census tracts where the shootings took place, another startling statistic emerged: Blacks were killed at three times the rate of other groups.

The Post data is consistent with previous attempts to track police shootings by demographics. A 2007 investigation by Colorlines and the The Chicago Reporter showed that blacks were overrepresented among police shooting victims in each of the country’s 10 largest cities. In Oakland, California, where Oscar Grant was fatally shot by transit police in 2009, thirty-seven of 45 officer-involved shooting victims between 2004 and 2008 were black, according to the NAACP.

Experts say that tracking police shootings is an essential step toward reducing their occurrence. In the absence of government databases, several grassroots efforts to track the shootings have emerged: the crowdsourced national database Fatal Encounters, a Google doc launched by Deadspin’s Kyle Wagner, and the interactive data site Mapping Police Violence.

There’s also evidence that the government is starting to take these cases more seriously. In December, Congress reauthorized the Death in Custody Reporting Act, which requires states to report the number of people killed during a police interaction. More recently, the White House Task Force on 21st Century Policing called on President Obama to launch independent investigations into all police shootings and to end policing tactics based on racial profiling.