police stats

2019

In 2019, 1,004 people were killed by police shootings according to The Washington Post, and 1,098 people were killed by police in total according to the “Mapping Police Violence” project.

​The total population of the US in 2019 was approximately 328 million.

1967 - 1982
 
“ . . . the frequency of deadly force looks quite small. There are 17,000 police departments in the United States, and American police have killed somewhere between 4,000 and 8,000 people over the last 15 years. Thus, arithmetic indicates that most police departments have killed nobody over the last 15 years. There are nearly a half million sworn police personnel in this country, and they encounter thousands of potentially violent situations every day, but even the greatest estimates of killings by police indicate that fewer than one in 60 officers have killed anybody over the last 15 years. Further, the limited data available suggest that most police shootings take place in large cities, so that rates of police killings in America’s small jurisdictions are probably far lower than this ….”

By JJ Fife, 1982 https://www.ojp.gov [U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs]

The total population of the US in 1982 was approximately 232 million.