Ten years after Ferguson, data on police killings shows a lack of progress

In the 10 years since Michael Brown Jr. was killed in Ferguson, Missouri, sparking nationwide protests against police brutality, documented police killings in the United States have continued at virtually the same rate, an NBC News analysis of the Mapping Police Violence database found.  

NBC News’ analysis found:

• Police killed 1,000 to 1,300 people each year from 2013 to 2023.
• Documented police killings have risen each year from 2019 to 2023, and if 2024’s current pace holds, it will continue the trend.
• Black people, Native Americans, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders have been killed at higher rates each year than the general population and higher rates than whites.

“Police violence hasn’t stopped,” said Sirry Alang, professor of Black communities and social determinants of health at the University of Pittsburgh. “It hasn’t decreased, despite all of the attention that we’ve had, socially or politically.”

Brown’s shooting by a police officer on Aug. 9, 2014, led to more than 11 days of protests in Ferguson and came just over three weeks after another Black man, Eric Garner, was killed during an encounter with police in New York. Both Brown and Garner were unarmed.

A 2021 study of police killings by a researcher at the University of North Carolina found that Black victims were less likely to have exhibited mental illness, less likely to have been armed, and more likely to have been attempting to flee compared to their white counterparts.

A grand jury declined to indict the officer who shot Brown, 18, despite the public outcry. And in the decade since, data shows there has not been an increase in charges brought against officers.

Philip Stinson, a professor of criminal justice at Bowling Green State University, has tracked cases of police officers charged with murder or manslaughter resulting from on-duty shootings since 2005. Though his numbers show prosecutors taking up more cases in recent years, Stinson told NBC News the totals are inflated due to numerous instances in which multiple officers were charged over the same incident.

“What I can say is that nothing has changed in the past decade in terms of any statistically significant change in officers being charged with murder or manslaughter resulting from on-duty shooting, and can also say that on-duty police are still killing 900 to 1,100+ people each and every year in this country,” Stinson wrote in an email. “In those regards, policing has not changed and reform efforts have been ineffective in changing those two facts.”

The Mapping Police Violence database is maintained by the police reform nonprofit Campaign Zero, which has been gathering data since 2015. Data is aggregated from publicly accessible media sources and reviewed by Campaign Zero’s researchers. The database shows that documented police killings have steadily increased in recent years.

More than 790 people have been reported killed by law enforcement so far this year, the highest count recorded at this point in a year to date. A similar database from The Washington Post has shown comparable trends.

Experts who study police violence say they have to rely on databases based on media reports because the federal government doesn’t keep comprehensive, reliable data on police violence. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tracks deaths due to legal intervention, but the figures lag by several years, and a 2021 study published in The Lancet found that it undercounted police killings by more than half.

And while the FBI created a national use-of-force database in 2019, the data is self-reported by individual law enforcement agencies, participation is voluntary, and the agency has yet to release detailed figures on killings.

“We are a country where we can collect data on all kinds of things if we really want to,” said Alang, from the University of Pittsburgh, who called the lack of federal figures a “huge problem.”

The issue of police killings made headlines again in recent weeks after the fatal shooting of Sonya Massey, a 36-year-old Black woman who was shot inside her home after calling police over fears of a prowler. The Illinois sheriff’s deputy who shot Massey has been charged with first-degree murder, aggravated battery with a firearm and official misconduct.

This story first appeared on NBCNews.com. More from NBC News:

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