How Often Do US Police Officers Shoot?

The numbers are unfortunately vague. There are no official or required statistics that would register how often police officers shoot at civilians for whatever reasons, and to which ethnic groups the victim and the shooter belong. Only fragmented data exist for this purpose, which can be found under search terms such as “officer-involved shootings” or “justifiable homicides.” Here is an attempt to summarize the data.

In 2001, the U.S. Department of Justice published a study about shootings of and by police. Data from 1976 to 1998 were used to investigate how often the police shoot and how often they are shot. In “Justifiable Homicide by Police, Police Officers Murdered by Felons,” two things were concluded above all: Around 400 people were shot by police officers each year, with an average rising trend. And about half of the deceased (56 percent) were white, and the other half (42 percent) were black.

In the Department of Justice study, the number was subsequently set in relation to population. According to the data, 183 million whites lived in America in 1998, and the police killed 225 in that year. The black population numbered 27 million, and the police killed 127. Therefore, in proportion to the size of the population groups, many more blacks than whites died. The skin color of the police officers throughout the country was also ascertained: In 1998, 87 percent of the police officers in the U.S. were white, and 11 percent were black.

Ambiguous Crime Statistics

The FBI obtained similar data. This was gathered in the so-called “Uniform Crime Reports (UCR),” similar to the “Polizeiliche Kriminalstatistik” of the BKA (Germany’s federal crime division). One part of the UCR consists of a table showing deadly shots fired by the police, or the “Supplementary Homicide Report.” The most up-to-date numbers in the report were recorded from 2009 to 2013. This study also arrives at the estimate of 400 “justifiable homicides” per year, with a rising trend.

In 2014, the Washington Post compared FBI data with the total number of reported crimes. The newspaper came to the conclusion that the crime rate in the past few years has consistently dropped; however, the number of killings at the hands of the police has not.

However, the FBI’s data has several issues. First of all, the data collection was not mandatory. The process was voluntary; each police station decided on its own, whether to report, and what to report. According to USA Today, only 750 of the approximately 17,000 police stations provided this kind of data to the FBI.

Secondly, certain information, such as the circumstances of the deaths and the ethnicities of the shooter and the victim, was by and large neglected. Thirdly, due to the guidelines of the data bank, no cases are included in the report in which the victim was unarmed.

The data blog FiveThirtyEight examined these official statistics and came to the conclusion that the numbers are not particularly reliable when it comes to fatalities caused by police. The risk is too high that the cause of death was incorrectly entered or the police officer responsibility in the killings was not included. How inexact the data are, FiveThirtyEight cannot state, but the author is certain that there are more than the 400 incidents per year as estimated by official count.

Despite Gaps in the Data, the Trend is Clear

The investigative website ProPublica also analyzed the FBI data. Despite the gaps and issues, a clear trend is recognizable if one compares the numbers of black and white victims of police violence, the authors write. The risk of being shot by a police officer is much higher for a black person than for a white person. The discrepancy is so great that it cannot be relegated to an error in the data. ProPublica investigated the data provided between 1980 and 2012 in the FBI Supplementary Homicide Report.

More exact data can be found with the New York Police Department. Each year it publishes the so-called “Firearm Discharge Report,” which analyzes when police officers use their weapons and why. Take the reports from 2012 and 2013, for example. The extensive statistics describe, among other things, the rules governing when police are allowed to fire and when they are not, they list how many incidents there are (about 100 per year with a downward trend), how many shots the police officers fire (meanwhile only one per incident), in what boroughs the most shootings occur, (Brooklyn), how long the officers have served on the force, (the more experience, the less often they shoot) and additionally, which population groups are affected.

According to the data, the targets of police shootings are mostly black: in 2013, they were the victims in 79 percent of the cases. Sixteen percent of the victims were Hispanic, five percent were white. Here the data also exhibits disproportionality in the number of black victims in comparison to their percentage of the New York population. Additionally, white police officers are more often the shooters (54 percent), and they represent the largest demographic group in the New York Police Department (52 percent).

Above all, the police study places these numbers in relation to a second category: those particular cases in which someone was under suspicion of being implicated in a criminal shootout. The absolute numbers cannot be compared. In 2013 there were 1,103 criminal shootouts in New York, but only 40 cases in which a police officer intentionally shot a person because they saw themselves or someone else being threatened (this category is called “Intentional Discharge – Adversarial Conflict.”) Only the relative values were compared. They could be evidence for a theory that blacks are increasingly on the receiving end because they are increasingly implicated in crimes being committed. But it does not necessarily contradict the thinking that blacks are increasingly the victims of police violence due to racist tendencies. In many cases, the victim was not carrying a weapon and additionally none were found in the vicinity of the incidents.

In comparison, German police officers rarely fire more than 100 shots at people per year, as a result of which eight to 15 people die per year and about 20 are injured. Here at home the data is collected at the Interior Ministers’ Conference; the ethnicity of the victim is not ascertained.

Civil Rights Activists Collect Their own data

Along with these official statistics, there are several studies in the U.S. conducted by media and civil rights organizations that try to answer the question of who is shot by the police and why.

In 2010, the NAACP investigated police statistics in Oakland. The study discovered 45 police shooting incidents that occurred between 2004 and 2008. Among the deceased were 37 black people and no white people. In 40 percent of the cases, no weapon was found on the victim, which, as already mentioned, could disprove the theory that every case involves people who had been implicated in a criminal shootout beforehand.

In 2007, the online magazine ColorLines and the monthly magazine Chicago in an article, “Killed by the Cops,” came to the conclusion that African-Americans are more often among the deceased than not. They form the largest group of victims in the cities of New York, San Diego, and Las Vegas in particular. In each of the cities, the number of black victims was two times as large as it may have been in view of the percentage of blacks in the entire population.

In conclusion, yes, blacks are more frequently shot by the police in the U.S. than members of other demographic groups. As to the idea that racist motives are responsible for this fact, there are possible indications, but not enough statistical evidence – due to the ambiguity and inconsistency of the data. But by itself, it is nevertheless an astounding fact.

For several years, the state of Missouri has mandated that data must be gathered which record why drivers are stopped by police officers. The data must also state what was suspected when the stop occurred, and the skin color of the occupants of the stopped vehicles. The statistics were created as an additional factor for use in establishing racist motives by police. However, for using a firearm, which can be deadly when used where there is doubt, there are no such mandatory statistics. None at all in the entire United States.

And yet one more thing is dubious about the data: Hardly any police officers were punished in connection to cases in which they had killed someone. Almost always, the decision is that they acted correctly, they felt threatened or acted out of self-defense. That a police officer is being prosecuted now in Charleston, South Carolina, is a total exception.