Counting the Killings
The state's count failed. Civilians converged. The total is rising.
The United States does not reliably count the people its police kill; the authoritative national numbers are built by a newspaper, activists, and a volunteer. This page leads with the evidence: every chart below re-derives, at render time, from a cited, hashed open-data release you can download and re-check. The essays and live instruments follow. Systems and design only, no partisan claims.
What the data shows
The count is rising, and the databases disagree by exactly one definition
Both living counts are up roughly 18 percent across the decade, with 2023 and 2024 the highest years on record. The gap between the two lines is not a dispute: Mapping Police Violence starts from the Post's shootings and adds the killings a shooting-only rule cannot see, about 109 people a year. Toggle the rule and watch them appear.
src: WaPo Fatal ForceMapping Police Violenceessay 04, the definition gap
The only federal count is voluntary, and it still can't stay publishable
The FBI's Use-of-Force collection gates its national totals on covering 80 percent of sworn officers. Participation being voluntary, it took six years to clear that bar, in 2024, and fell back below it the next year. A count that depends on volunteering never finishes.
src: USAFacts on the FBI collectionthe FBI collection itselfessay 02, the federal blind spotthe live coverage curve
The government's own death records missed more than half
The deepest undercount is the state's. A peer-reviewed reconstruction in The Lancet found the National Vital Statistics System failed to attribute 55.5 percent of deaths from police violence over 1980-2018, 17,100 of an estimated 30,800, filed under another cause. The misclassification was pervasive for every group and highest for Black Americans, at 59.4 percent, a measurement finding about whose deaths the certificates failed to count.
src: The Lancet (GBD 2019)essay 06, how many did nobody count
Three independent civilian trackers agree on the same people
Match the lists person by person, from MPV's own linkage columns, and rival projects turn out to know about the same deaths: in 2019, 99.4 percent of MPV's cases were also on the Post's or Fatal Encounters' lists, and no overlap year falls below 98.4 percent. Civil society converged where the state could not.
src: MPV linkage, re-derivedFatal EncountersThe Counted (Guardian)essay 06
The rise is where reform isn't
Mapping Police Violence's year-end analysis finds killings declining in the biggest cities, many of which rewrote use-of-force policy over the past decade, while rising in suburban and rural areas policed by thousands of smaller agencies, and the record years arrived while national homicide figures were falling. The national total is the sum of those two curves.
Carried as a cited finding, not a chart: this dataset holds aggregates only, never the record-level rows a geographic split would need. Honesty about what we hold is part of the method.
The government tested the civilian method. It worked.
Before any of this was settled, the Bureau of Justice Statistics assessed its own Arrest-Related Deaths program and found it captured, at best, 49 percent of law-enforcement homicides. It suspended the collection in 2014, piloted the open-source media review the civilian trackers use, and the pilot identified 1,348 potential deaths in ten months, an estimated 1,900 for the year. The state's own statisticians validated the method in 2016; the finding sat in a PDF.
src: BJS assessment (NCJ 248543)BJS redesign pilot (NCJ 250112)
An outlier among peer countries, every one of them counting differently
The US rate, 33.5 per 10 million people, runs 3.4 times the next-highest peer. The honest caveat is the series' own thesis: every country counts under its own definition and system, so the comparison is indicative, not harmonized. The US figure derives from MPV's 2019 count of 1,099, the same number in the chart at the top of this page.
src: Prison Policy Initiative (2020)the release's international table
The rise and the blind spot are the same agencies
The board's findings meet in one place. This dataset carries the federal collection measured two ways in the same year: agencies that report employ 53 percent of the country's officers, but only 37 percent of departments file at all. The big departments report; the missing mass is thousands of small agencies. The rise in finding 05, meanwhile, is concentrated in suburban and rural areas policed by exactly those agencies. Whatever each department's reason for silence, the killings are growing in exactly the agencies that do not report them, which is this series' whole thesis stated as a finding.
src: FBI collection participation (2022)MPV 2024 year-end reportessay 08, the two whys
The disparity survives every definition
A series about definitional fragility owes special weight to the number no definition can move. Every counter here that publishes rates by race finds Black Americans killed at two to three and a half times the white rate: the Post's shootings-only rates, MPV's all-killings ratio, and the Lancet's forty-year reconstruction, three rules, three eras, one direction. These are population-level measurements, quoted from each instrument's own figures; the essay names the denominator debate honestly and asserts no cause. The counting failure compounds it: the group with the highest rate is also the group whose deaths official records misclassified most (finding 03).
src: WaPo databaseMPV 2024 reportThe Lancet (GBD 2019)essay 09, the number that does not move
The years, side by side
| Year | MPV, all killings | Post, shootings only | Guardian, all killings |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2013 | 1,075 | · | · |
| 2014 | 1,039 | · | · |
| 2015 | 1,099 | 995 | 1,146 |
| 2016 | 1,065 | 959 | 1,093 |
| 2017 | 1,091 | 984 | · |
| 2018 | 1,138 | 992 | · |
| 2019 | 1,099 | 993 | · |
| 2020 | 1,161 | 1,021 | · |
| 2021 | 1,148 | 1,050 | · |
| 2022 | 1,204 | 1,097 | · |
| 2023 | 1,248 | 1,164 | · |
| 2024 | 1,270 | 1,175 | · |
Aggregated from each project's primary dataset · a dot means the project was not counting that year · 2024 is the highest year on both living counts
The readings
- 01Who Counts the KillingsThe state's own count was too incomplete to publish, so a newspaper, a nonprofit, and a volunteer started counting.develops the counters
- 02The Federal Blind SpotThe FBI has the widest definition of all and, for most of its life, could not publish a national total.develops finding 02
- 03Five Counters, Five DefinitionsNo two projects report the same total, because no two are counting the same thing.develops finding 01
- 04The Definition GapChange one rule about what counts, and about a hundred people a year appear or vanish.develops finding 01
- 05The Open DataA series about counting owes you a count you can open, test, and argue with yourself.develops the release
- 06How Many Did Nobody CountMatch the databases person by person and the surprise is agreement. The real undercount turns out to be the government's own death records.develops findings 03-04
- 07What a Real Count Would TakeThe design spec assembled from the whole series: a mandate, a written definition, the method the government already validated, and an outside audit. The engineering is done.develops findings 01-06
- 08The Two WhysWhy is the count rising, and why do agencies not report? Explanations ranked by evidence strength, ending where they meet: the killings are growing in exactly the agencies that do not report them.develops finding 08
- 09The Number That Does Not MoveBlack Americans are killed at two to three and a half times the white rate under every instrument in this series. The measurement, the denominator debate named honestly, and the counting failure that compounds it.develops finding 09
- 10Where the Ratio Comes FromThe causes question, graded by evidence: exposure that is demonstrably not race-blind, an encounter stage carried as the live dispute it is, the 1-in-1,000 lifetime risk, and the city-by-city variance that points at policy, not people.develops finding 09
- 11The Other Side of the LedgerThe count of what happens to officers fails the same ways: a voluntary assault count computed on whoever shows up, a reporting crater, and volunteer memorials that outrun the official ledger and disagree on definition, 73 versus 458 for the same year. The legibility gap does not take sides.develops finding 02
- 12The Word MandatedA career officer said every department is mandated to report deadly force. He was right, and the national count is still voluntary, and both are true at once: department policy, the state patchwork with two working proofs, and a federal mandate the government's own auditors found leaking at every joint.develops finding 02