In 2024, U.S. police killed at least 1,365 people—the highest number recorded in the past decade.
Despite growing public awareness and calls for reform, the institutions responsible for these deaths continue to operate with minimal transparency. The absence of comprehensive data collection and reporting mechanisms allows systemic issues within law enforcement to persist unchecked.
What the Data Reveals
Record-High Fatalities: At least 1,365 people were killed by police in 2024, marking the deadliest year in the past decade.
Racial Disparities: Black Americans are nearly three times more likely to be killed by police than white Americans.
Incomplete Reporting: The FBI’s National Use-of-Force Data Collection program, launched in 2019, remains voluntary. As of June 2024, only 72% of law enforcement agencies had submitted data, falling short of the 80% threshold required for public release of detailed statistics.
Underreported Incidents: The Washington Post’s database indicates that many fatal police shootings are not captured in federal data, with only a third of departments’ fatal shootings appearing in the FBI database by 2021.
Nonfatal Encounters: Approximately 250,000 civilians are injured by law enforcement annually, with around 75,000 requiring hospital treatment.
The Implications of Data Gaps
The lack of federally mandated, standardized reporting allows law enforcement agencies to obscure or entirely omit violent encounters from the public record. But this information vacuum hasn’t stopped communities, researchers, and journalists from stepping in.
Independent organizations like Mapping Police Violence and Police Scorecard have become essential sources of data. Using a combination of public records, media reports, social media verification, and crowdsourced information, these groups have built some of the most comprehensive national databases tracking police killings, use of force, and racial disparities. These projects operate without government funding, often relying on open-source technology and volunteer labor.
Academic centers like the Center for Policing Equity and research collectives such as the Police Violence Research Group at the University of Illinois–Chicago also play a critical role. They analyze police behavior and outcomes at scale—offering evidence that challenges the official narratives put forward by departments.
Meanwhile, journalists from The Washington Post, The Guardian (via The Counted), and local investigative reporters have taken up the task of building shadow databases where none exist officially. Civil rights attorneys frequently uncover buried misconduct through the discovery process in lawsuits, adding yet another layer of documentation pieced together outside the system.
The implications are clear: the burden of truth-telling has fallen to those with the least institutional power. And yet, their findings have become the backbone of what the public knows about police violence. These grassroots and third-party efforts don’t just fill a gap—they reveal the intentionality behind the state’s refusal to track its own harm.
Until law enforcement is required to record and report the full scope of its actions, these independent efforts remain not just valuable—they are essential.