Police killed over a thousand people in the U.S. in 2024, new data reveals — the deadliest year on record, with data showing that police killings are on the rise.
According to a report by Mapping Police Violence, police killed at least 1,365 people in 2024, making it the deadliest year since the group began recording such data in 2013.
This marks a 0.3 percent increase in the rate of killings from 2023, with police killing four out of every million people in the U.S. last year, at a rate of roughly 3.7 people per day. This means that police killed someone once every 6 and a half hours on average.
Black and Indigenous people are disproportionately targeted by police violence, the report finds, with both groups roughly 3 times more likely to be killed by police than white people in 2024.
There were only 10 days in 2024 that no one in the U.S. was killed by police, researchers observed. However, the report notes that it’s possible there were killings that were not publicly reported and therefore are missing from the data.
Those killed include people like Sonya Massey, a 36-year-old Black woman who police shot in the face and killed in July after she called 911 for help. Police initially lied about her killing, but body camera footage from the officer who killed her, Sean Grayson, refuted their account. Massey’s family was awarded a $10 million wrongful death settlement earlier this month, and Grayson is being held in jail and awaiting trial.
The fact that Massey’s killer was charged with a crime makes her case an anomaly, as police who kill people are not charged in the vast majority of cases.
In an earlier update on the data this year analyzing 1,252 police killings, Mapping Police Violence noted that officers were only charged with crimes in nine cases, or less than 1 percent of the killings. Further, the majority of killings happened when police were responding to a non-violent offense; Black people were more likely than white people to be killed when unarmed or not posing a threat.
Mapping Police Violence’s figures line up with those of other sources, with The Washington Post also finding that 2024 was the deadliest year on record for police violence. According to the Post, police have shot and killed at least 10,429 people in the U.S. in the last decade.
However, the Post has noted that it will no longer be counting police killings starting in 2025, despite having done so for a decade now. The change comes as the publication’s billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos, has exerted an increasingly right-wing influence on the paper.
There are already very few resources to track police violence in the U.S. Last week, the Justice Department confirmed that Donald Trump has shut down a federal database that tracked misconduct by federal law enforcement officers, known as the National Law Enforcement Accountability Database.
However, the efficacy of the database was questionable. The database was only active for roughly a year, with the Department of Justice creating it in December of 2023 as part of an executive order signed by President Joe Biden in 2022.
The database only ever put out one report — in December of 2023, it found 4,790 records of misconduct by federal officers between 2018 and 2023, based on voluntary reporting from federal law enforcement agencies. Further, misconduct was only counted when there were records of an officer facing consequences for their actions, like a conviction or suspension from service.
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