Agencies with multiple offices - such as state police departments and federal law enforcement agencies - were often combined into one code for ease of comparison against other full departments. The Post supplemented this database in 2022 by publishing police agency names and appending each agency’s unique federal identifying code. The Post conducted additional reporting in many cases. 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 Washington Post’s database contains records of every fatal shooting in the United States by a police officer in the line of duty since Jan.
Police killed the highest number of people on record in 2022. The number of fatal police shootings has risen slightly in recent years. How 2023 compares with previous calendar years 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. Since then, reporters have recorded thousands of deaths. Also compounding the problem: an updated FBI system for reporting data and confusion among local law enforcement about reporting responsibilities.Īs part of its investigation, The Post began in 2015 to log every person shot and killed by an on-duty police officer in the United States. This is largely because local police departments are not required to report these incidents to the federal government.
By 2021, only a third of departments’ fatal shootings appeared in the FBI database. On average, police in the United States shoot and kill more than 1,000 people every year, according to an ongoing analysis by The Washington Post.Īfter Michael Brown, an unarmed Black man, was killed in 2014 by police in Ferguson, Mo., a Post investigation found that data reported to the FBI on fatal police shootings was undercounted by more than half.
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