Police shootings database 2015-2024: Search by race, age, department
About this story
The Washington Post’s database contains records of every fatal shooting in the United States by a police officer in the line of duty since Jan. 1, 2015.
In 2015, The Post began tracking more than a dozen details about each killing — including the race of the deceased, the circumstances of the shooting, whether the person was armed and whether the person was experiencing a mental health crisis — by culling local news reports, law enforcement websites and social media, and by monitoring independent databases such as Killed by Police and Fatal Encounters. The Post conducted additional reporting in many cases.
The Post supplemented this database in 2022 by publishing police agency names and appending each agency’s unique federal identifying code. This work involved some manual cleanup. Agencies with multiple offices — such as state police departments and federal law enforcement agencies — were often combined into one code for ease of comparison against other full departments.
The Post is documenting only those shootings in which a police officer in the line of duty, shoots and kills a civilian — the circumstances that most closely parallel the 2014 killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., which began the protest movement culminating in Black Lives Matter and an increased focus on police accountability nationwide. The Post is not tracking deaths of people in police custody, fatal shootings by off-duty officers or non-shooting deaths.
The FBI and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention log fatal shootings by police, but officials acknowledge that their data is incomplete. Since 2015, The Post has documented more than twice as many fatal shootings by police as recorded on average annually by these agencies.
The Post’s database is updated regularly as fatal shootings are reported and as facts emerge about individual cases. The Post seeks to make the database as comprehensive as possible. To provide information about fatal police shootings since Jan. 1, 2015, send us an email at policeshootingsfeedback@washpost.com.
There may be a lag between the date of the shooting and its inclusion in the database because of delays in reporting and data verification.
For a full data dictionary and methodology on the data collection, see here.
Originally published May 30, 2015. Re-released with department data on Dec. 5, 2022.
Credits
Research and Reporting: Hayden Godfrey, Steven Rich, Andrew Ba Tran and the students of the American University Investigative Practicum, including Dima Amro, Daniela Lobo, Siddhi Mahatole, Mirika Rayaprolu and Madeleine Sherer.
Design and development: Chris Alcantara, Katlyn Alo, Emma Baker, Aaron Brezel, Armand Emamdjomeh, Jake Kara, Paige Moody, James O’Toole and Leslie Shapiro.
Editing: David Fallis, Reuben Fischer-Baum, Meghan Hoyer, Courtney Kan and Angela Mecca.
Past contributors: Keith L. Alexander, Sophie Andrews, Jason Bartz, Amy Brittain, Swetabh Changkakoti, Sarah Childress, Susan Doyle, Hong Sen Du, Kennedy Elliot, Linda Epstein, Holden Foreman, Joe Fox, Wendy Galietta, Kaeti Hinck, Jennifer Jenkins, Laris Karklis, Kimberly Kindy, Whitney Leaming, Emily Liu, Wesley Lowery, Monika Mathur, Ted Mellnik, Lori Montgomery, Deblina Mukherjee, John Muyskens, Razzan Nakhlawi, Erik Reyna, Danielle Rindler, Kavya Sukumar, John Sullivan, Julie Tate, Susan Tyler, Divya Verma, Aaron Williams.
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