Police killings of unarmed people down

The number of deadly police shootings of unarmed people has generally declined since 2015 even as the tally of fatal shootings by law enforcement is on pace to hit nearly 1,000 for the fourth year in a row, according to data gathered by The Washington Post.

Fatal shootings of unarmed black men — such as the highprofile case in March of Stephon Clark in Sacramento, California — are among the kinds of killings that have fallen. Criminologists said the downturn and their own analysis of the data indicate that evidence of racial bias by police who shoot and kill unarmed blacks also has declined.

“These trends mark significant changes,” said Geoff Alpert, a professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of South Carolina who has been reviewing and studying the data at the Post’s request. “What we don’t understand yet is what’s causing these numbers to move downward.”

In 2015, police shot and killed 94 unarmed individuals, a number that fell to 51 in 2016 before rising to 68 in 2017. This year, police have shot and killed 18, eight fewer than at the same time last year.

Academics warn that the numbers regarding bias are so small that even a few cases recorded in error could produce a different result.

The Post researchers began tracking deadly police shootings in 2015. Information about shootings is gleaned from news reports and other public sources and compiled in a publicly available database.

In March, the shooting of Clark reignited the debate about police actions. Police shot Clark in the back yard of his grandmother’s home. Clark, a 22-year-old black man, was unarmed but holding a cellphone. The shooting was captured by police body cameras and in helicopter video.

The Post project has found that police have shot and killed 3,309 people since 2015, or more than twice as many fatal shootings per year as the average reported by the FBI. Of those killed, 231, or 7 percent, were not armed with guns, knives or other objects that could be used as weapons, according to the data.