Resources

In 2015, The Washington Post began to log every fatal shooting by an on-duty police officer in the United States. In that time there have been more than 5,000 such shootings recorded by The Post.

After Michael Brown, an unarmed Black man, was killed in 2014 by police in Ferguson, Mo., a Post investigation found that the FBI undercounted fatal police shootings by more than half. This is because reporting by police departments is voluntary and many departments fail to do so.

The Post’s data relies primarily on news accounts, social media postings and police reports. Analysis of more than five years of data reveals that the number and circumstances of fatal shootings and the overall demographics of the victims have remained relatively constant.

A comprehensive accounting of police killings since 2013. Includes raw data, maps, and visuals. 

Mapping Police Violence collected data on over 1,100 killings by police in 2021. We compiled this information from media reports, obituaries, public records, and databases like Fatal Encounters and the WashingtonPost. Despite the federal government’s efforts to create a national database on this issue, their Use of Force Data Collection program is expected to shut down this year because fewer than 60% of the nation’s law enforcement reported data to the program. As such, this report represents the most comprehensive public accounting of deadly police violence in 2021. Our analysis suggests the majority of killings by police in 2021 could have been prevented and that specific policies and practices might prevent police killings in the future.

The Police Scorecard is the first nationwide public evaluation of policing in the United States. The Scorecard calculates levels of police violence, accountability, racial bias and other policing outcomes for over 16,000 municipal and county law enforcement agencies, covering nearly 100% of the US population. The indicators included in this scorecard were selected based on a review of the research literature, input from activists and experts in the field, and a review of publicly available datasets on policing from federal, state, and local agencies. This project is designed to help communities, researchers, police leaders and policy-makers take data-informed action to reduce police use of force, increase accountability and reimagine public safety in their jurisdictions.

In response to a recent data request, the Controller’s Office is releasing historical information about the Police department’s annual budget and the number of total homicides citywide. Controller Rhynhart believes transparency is crucial for creating a fair and equitable City government that works for everyone, particularly the most vulnerable Philadelphians. The City has a responsibility to its residents to provide information in an easily accessible and understandable format. Per the data request, the data shows the Police department’s budget together with the city’s annual homicide total. It is important to note, however, that a number of factors beyond policing influence the homicide rate. Increases in the Police budget are due primarily to personnel costs, including negotiated wage increases and additional uniformed positions.

The Full Disclosure Project aims to disrupt the culture of secrecy that systematically and pervasively shields law enforcement misconduct by changing police secrecy laws and empowering the defense community to track police misconduct.

NoMoreCopMoney is a national database that documents campaign funds current state and local politicians accepted from law enforcement-affiliated PACs since 2015. We provide contact information to make it easy to ask your representatives to donate these campaign funds and to pledge to refuse them in the future. Our goal is to decrease the influence of law enforcement in our government.

This interactive mapping project spatially represents where incidents of LMPD gun violence has occurred across the City of Louisville and illuminates patterns of this particular form of police violence through an anti-oppression lens.

From monitoring traffic to preventing crime, closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras have a range of purposes. But with increasingly-high resolutions, more remote access to live video streams, and the utilization of technologies like facial recognition and Ring doorbell cameras – just how much is too much when it comes to police surveillance? This resource collected data about some of the most surveilled cities in the United States, correlations between increased surveillance cameras and reduction in crime, and further areas of concern.