Despite ongoing national scrutiny of police tactics, the number of fatal shootings by officers in 2016 remained virtually unchanged from last year when nearly 1,000 people were killed by police.
Through Thursday, law enforcement officers fatally shot 957 people in 2016 – close to three each day – down slightly from 2015 when 991 people were shot to death by officers, according to an ongoing project by The Washington Post to track the number of fatal shootings by police.
The Post, for two years in a row, has documented more than twice the number of fatal shootings recorded by the FBI annually on average.
As was the case in 2015, a disproportionate number of those killed this year were black, and about a quarter involved someone who had a mental illness. In a notable shift from 2015, more of the fatal shootings this year were captured on video.
Dozens of departments have vowed reforms since the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missiouri, in August 2014 launched a national debate over police use of force. Many agencies have equipped officers with body cameras, with prominent police chiefs vowing to further curb fatal encounters. But experts say an impact on fatal shootings may take years.
“Making these kinds of changes is very difficult on such a widespread scale,” said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a Washington-based think tank pushing for national police reform. “But quite frankly, we’re still on the front-end of the training that we’re pushing out. It may be at least six months to a year until we start to really see those numbers come down.”
In the second year of tracking, The Post found:
White males continued to be those most often killed, accounting for 46 percent of this year’s deaths – about the same as in 2015. But when adjusted by population, black males were three times as likely to die as their white counterparts.The percentage of fatal shootings of unarmed people declined in 2016, from 9 percent in 2015 to 5 percent. Black males, however, continued to represent a disproportionate share of those: 34 percent of the unarmed people killed this year were black males, although they are 6 percent of the population.Of all those who were shot and killed, 84 percent were armed, most with a gun or knife. Four percent wielded imitation firearms. In 7 percent of the fatalities, it was unclear whether the person was armed.Mental illness remained a factor in many of the fatal shootings. As was the case last year, about 1 in 4 people fatally shot by police in 2016 were grappling with a mental health issue, according to The Post’s analysis.The consistency from 2015 to 2016 is telling, experts said.
“It shows that one year wasn’t an anomaly,” said Geoff Alpert, a criminology professor at the University of South Carolina. “It’s a very robust number that is something we can trust in the future and a good measure to see when things do change.”
This year, The Post gathered additional information about officers involved in fatal shootings from media reports or news releases and filed more than 1,000 public-records requests from each police department involved in a fatal shooting. One-fourth of the departments queried by The Post have not responded to the requests.
Many gave only partial information. Of those who responded, only a third of the departments provided the race of the officers involved in fatal shootings. The racial breakdown roughly matched the composition of local and state police departments nationwide, according to federal data.
For the 811 officers about whom work information was disclosed or gathered, their average time on the job was nine years, and three-quarters of them were assigned to patrol. At least 60 officers who fatally shot someone this year had done so previously.
