Despite reforms, police shot dead 1,000 a year
Experts are left confounded
Protests against the use of deadly force by police swept across the country in 2015.
Demonstrators marched in Chicago, turned chaotic in Baltimore, and occupied the area outside a Minneapolis police station for weeks. Protesters repeatedly took to the streets of Ferguson, Mo., where a white police officer had killed a black teenager the previous year and fueled anew a national debate about the use of force and how police treat minor
ities.
That year, the Washington Post began tallying how many people were shot and killed by police. By the end of 2015, officers had fatally shot nearly 1,000 people, twice as many as ever documented in one year by the federal government.
With the issue flaring in city after city, some officials vowed to reform how police use force.
The next year, however, police nationwide again shot and killed nearly 1,000 people. Then they fatally shot about the same number in 2017 — and have done so for every year after that, according to the Post’s ongoing count. Since 2015, police have shot and killed 5,400 people.
This toll has proven impervious to waves of protests. The number killed has remained steady despite fluctuating crime rates, changeovers in big-city police leadership and a push for criminal justice reform.
Even amid the coronavirus pandemic and orders that kept millions at home for weeks, police shot and killed 463 people through the first week of June — 49 more than the same period in 2019. In May, police shot and killed 110 people, the most in any one month since the Post year over year consistency has confounded those who have spent decades studying the issue began tracking it.
“It is difficult to explain why we haven’t seen significant fluctuations in the shooting from year to year,” former Charlotte police chief Darrel Stephens said. “There’s been significant investments that have been made in deescalation training. There’s been a lot of work.”
The overwhelming majority of people killed are armed. Nearly half of all people fatally shot by police are white. Most of these shootings draw little or no attention beyond a news story.
Some become flash points in the country’s ongoing reckoning about race and police. The ones prompting the loudest outcries often involve people who are black, unarmed, or both, shootings that have brought the harshest scrutiny onto police.
Since the Post began tracking the shootings, black people have been shot and killed by police at disproportionate rates — both in terms of overall shootings and the shootings of unarmed Americans. The number of black and unarmed people fatally shot by police has declined since 2015, but whether armed or not, black people are still shot and killed at a disproportionately higher rate than white people.
Some of the most incendiary moments in recent years involving police and race occurred without a gunshot.
Eric Garner was videotaped pleading for air with a New York police officer’s arm around his neck before his death in 2014. Freddie Gray died of a severe spinal injury in Baltimore the following year, suffered when he was transported in a police van.
The outrage now rippling across America began when a video from Minneapolis showed George Floyd, hands cuffed behind his back and prone on the ground, gasping “I can’t breathe” as a white police officer drove his knee into the black man’s neck. The officer held it there for nearly 9 minutes, prosecutors said.
It was the kind of use-of-force incident that might have gone otherwise unnoticed. Minneapolis police initially reported that Floyd “physically resisted officers” and then “appeared to be suffering medical distress.” No weapons of any kind were used, police added.
Then the video footage emerged. It showed Floyd pinned on the street, begging for air, calling for his mother, for minute after minute. The officer and three others with him at the scene were fired and all face criminal charges.
His death became a spark, setting off anger that spread quickly, extending into big cities and small towns, red states and blue.
Floyd’s death was “one event in a continuous system of oppression,” said the Rev. Graylan Hagler of the Plymouth Congregational United Church of Christ in the District. “We know some names now, but there are thousands of those we do not know.”
Hagler, who has been organizing protests and talking to activists, said the emergence of video footage showing controversial police encounters has been pivotal in transforming the national conversation.
“White Americans generally thought police to (be) friendly protectors and … generally looked at stories of police misconduct cynically, and all of a sudden they have to come face-to-face with the myth that they have been living with,” Hagler said.
The nationwide frustration with police has exploded amid a pandemic that has taken a particularly brutal toll on black Americans. It also has emerged following a spate of incidents again highlighting issues involving race and justice in America — including the death of Breonna Taylor, an aspiring nurse in Louisville killed by police serving a no-knock warrant who shot her eight times in her home; the death of Ahmaud Arbery, a black jogger chased down and shot to death in Georgia; and the viral video of a white woman wielding the police as a threat against a black birdwatcher during a confrontation in Central Park.
After Floyd’s death, these incidents and other tensions already enveloping America unleashed pent-up anger, fear and pain.
“This is generational, what we’re seeing on the streets of America,” said Phillip Atiba Goff, a professor in policing equity at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “This is the past-due notice for the unpaid debts this country owes black America. And as always, law enforcement is just the spark, right?”
Fatal police shootings are relatively rare events in a country where nearly 40,000 people die from firearms each year. Hundreds of thousands of police officers work in America, most of whom will never fire their guns on duty.
When fatal shootings occur, police officials often contend that officers, facing mortal threats, had to make split-second decisions to protect themselves and others. Police patrol a country with almost as many guns as people, and they never know if the next traffic stop, 911 call, or search warrant will be the one where someone comes out shooting.
Los Angeles Police Chief Michel Moore said he would rather his officers never have to use deadly force.
“But last year, I had officers in eight instances that were shot at,” he said. “So those are difficult circumstances in which to ask an officer to not defend himself. In fact, they’re not difficult. They’re impossible.”
Since 2015, 70 percent of the 5,400 people fatally shot by police were armed with a knife or a gun, according to the Post’s database. More than 3,000 of them had guns.
White people, who account for 60 perecent of the American population, made up 45 percent of those shot and killed by police. Black people make up 13 percent of the population but have accounted for 23 percent of those shot and killed by police. Hispanic people, which account for about 18 percent of the population, make up 16 percent of the people killed. For 9 percent of people, the Post was unable to determine their race.
The cycle kept repeating. A shooting or other deadly encounter with police would propel the issue back into the news. Graphic video of it would go viral. People would mobilize and march. Again and again, activists called for the justice system to punish those involved.
Even when officers are prosecuted, convictions are difficult to obtain, said Philip M. Stinson, a criminologist at Bowling Green State University in Ohio.
Since 2005, 110 nonfederal law enforcement officers have been charged with murder or manslaughter for shooting someone on duty, his records show. From those ranks, 42 officers were convicted of a crime — often a lesser offense — while 50 were not, their cases usually ending with acquittals or dismissals. More than a dozen cases are pending, he said.
Though some protests have turned violent, policing has gotten safer in recent decades, with line-of-duty deaths dropping, records show. But police patrol a country with nearly one gun for every person, and recent studies from professors at Harvard and Carnegie Mellon universities have found that areas with higher rates of gun ownership have higher rates of police shootings.
“The overwhelming majority of those shooting situations are … both lawful and within policy and are situations that we hope that we can minimize and avoid,” said Stephens.
The outcries and criticism have led to reforms.
Some departments have issued new use-of-force policies, vowed to outfit officers with body cameras and added training to address implicit bias. After Stephon Clark was shot and killed by Sacramento officers in 2018, California adopted stricter rules for use of force. But the momentum stalled. Some departments decided to drop or postpone their bodycam programs, concluding it was too costly to store the data.
The thousands of police departments nationwide each have their own policies. Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, said there are “no national standards” regarding training or use of force.
In Minneapolis, the police had been making reforms long before Floyd’s death. The city was one of the program sites for an initiative meant to tackle mistrust of police in minority communities. Officers underwent training and education aimed at addressing implicit bias.
“Minneapolis put in a lot of work,” said Jesse Jannetta, a senior policy fellow at the Urban Institute, which evaluated the work. “They did the intervention. They did, and that was not sufficient to prevent George Floyd from losing his life.”
Fatal shootings by police drifted out of the public spotlight.
But fatal shootings by police have not slowed — even during the pandemic lockdowns. In May 2019, police shot and killed 74 people. In May of this year, police shot and killed 109 people.
Another consistent statistic from the Post’s examination is the number of people killed by police while in mental distress. About 1 in 4 had some mental health issues.
One explanation for the overall consistency in the number of fatal shootings — and the inability of reforms in individual departments to make much of a dent — comes from probability theory, which suggests that the number of rare events in huge populations will achieve stability absent larger societal changes.
Moore, the Los Angeles police chief, said police need to hear the public’s frustrations about shootings. He said significant time and money has been invested in training officers to de-escalate standoffs and emphasizing the sanctity of life in public interactions.
“It makes me frustrated because there will be a tendency to think nothing has changed, when I know so many instances of police chiefs that have told me that six months ago we would have shot that guy, and we didn’t because of the training that they’ve received,” Wexler said.
Advocates of police reform said part of the problem is the lack of a full, nationwide accounting of police use of force.
Government officials pledged years ago to start collecting more data on the use of force.
That data collection only began in earnest in January 2019, but participation is voluntary. So far, only 40 percent of the 18,000 police departments nationwide submit data on use-of-force incidents, according to the FBI.
Fatal shootings by police are a limited metric for answering larger questions about how police use their powers, experts said.No nationwide data exists on how often police shoot and wound someone, or how often they fire and miss. And no comprehensive national data exists on how other kinds of force — like chokeholds or the use of batons or Tasers — are used.
Floyd’s death is a prime example of that, Alpert said.
During the current wave of protests, police have been filmed again and again using force against people.
“We’re in the middle of an international pandemic,” said Goff, the professor. “People are risking their lives to have their voice heard.”