To find out, I went looking for charts, and because I can’t cut-and-paste some of them, you’ll have to click through links to see them.
Let’s start with this chart from Statistica that gives numbers for 2017-2023. While the number increased every year, the uptrend was slight until the pace began picking up in 2020, coinciding with the Covid pandemic — although correlation is not causation. But on a broad scale, U.S. cops reportedly kill about 1,000 people a year.
I say “reportedly” because there’s a huge caveat with this data: There’s no centralized reporting of police shootings in the U.S., and these figures which are compiled by the FBI are based on voluntary reporting by America’s more than 18,000 police agencies. A Washington Post article in May 2024 suggested the actual number could be three times higher, and the amount of underreporting is rising.
But it’s the only data we have to work with, and as incomplete as it is, it’s the only picture we have of trends. More accurately reported is the number of police officers killed in the line of duty; that number has varied between about 30 and 70 a year in recent years (chart here).
This doesn’t include deaths from accidents and other causes; during the pandemic, Covid was by far the single largest cause of line-of-duty deaths, and police agencies were a hotbed of mask and vaccine resistance (in that case, correlation may point to causation).
What’s clear is U.S. police kill far more than being killed, consistently by a factor of ten or more. This by itself doesn’t imply police shootings are unjustified; it could equally mean police work is dangerous in America.
By comparison, police in the U.K., which has about one-fifth of the U.S. population, kill between 1 and 6 people a year, see Statistica chart here. Delving into why there’s such a huge disparity is beyond the scope of this article, but one obvious reason is America has more guns and violence.
How do U.S. police shootings break down by race? In available data, as you would expect: Although police kill more whites, they kill blacks at a disproportionately higher rate. Again, this is based on sketchy data, and could be for any number of reasons, such as more poverty and crime in black neighborhoods.
Finally, again based on available data (for 2000-2018 in this chart), the number of U.S. police shootings per 100,000 population varies dramatically among cities, with St. Louis racking up the highest rate (36.1), with Orland0 (28.1) and Las Vegas (25.5) second and third, with New York (0.2), Boston (2.3), and Honolulu (3.6) at the lower end of the scale. This could be attributable, in part, to differences in crime rates.
Among states, from the same chart and time period, New Mexico leads (12.1) followed by Oklahoma (11.3) and Alaska (11.2), with Massachusetts and Rhode Island (1.8), Connecticut (1.9), and New York (2.0) at the lowest end. Red and blue states are scattered throughout that chart, suggesting partisan orientation doesn’t have a impact on police shooting rates.
In summary, based on incomplete reporting, the number of police shootings of civilians in the United States has held consistent over time, with the slight uptrend possibly attributable to increased population. It doesn’t appear U.S. police are becoming more trigger-happy, despite the growth in guns in circulation, but against a backdrop of falling crime rates following the Covid pandemic.
What’s the purpose of this inquiry? Well, I think we want to know whether police are too violent, too quick to shoot, or out of control. You can get that impression from news stories, especially those about police killings of black men, and lawsuit settlements suggest not all police shootings are self-defense or otherwise justified. And news coverage can create the impression that police shootings happen a lot.
But with over a million police officers, 90% of them full-time and 10% part-time or reserve, working for more than 18,000 U.S. police agencies (as of 2019, see article here), the rate of police fatal shootings is about 1 per 1,000 officers per year (although multiple officers may be involved in many of the shootings). The reality is that police killings are rare, and most cops will never be involved in one during their careers.
For the average citizen, encountering an average cop, a lying cop may be a more salient issue than a trigger-happy one (see story here). This isn’t an article on cop dishonesty, but that’s a problem in U.S. policing, too.