Protests spread over police shootings. Police promised reforms. Every year, they still shoot and kill nearly 1,000 people.

WASHINGTON POST

Protests against the use of deadly force by police swept across the country in 2015.

Demonstrators marched in Chicago, turned chaotic in Baltimore, and occupied the area outside a Minneapolis police station for weeks. Protesters repeatedly took to the streets of Ferguson, Mo., where a white police officer had killed a black teenager the previous year and fueled anew a national debate about the use of force and how police treat minorities.

That year, The Washington Post began tallying how many people were shot and killed by police. By the end of 2015, officers had fatally shot nearly 1,000 people, twice as many as ever documented in one year by the federal government.

With the issue flaring in city after city, some officials vowed to reform how police use force.

The next year, however, police nationwide again shot and killed nearly 1,000 people. Then they fatally shot about the same number in 2017 — and have done so for every year after that, according to The Post’s ongoing count. Since 2015, police have shot and killed 5,400 people.

This toll has proved impervious to waves of protests, such as those now flooding American streets in the wake of George Floyd’s death at the hands of police in Minneapolis. The number killed has remained steady despite fluctuating crime rates, changeovers in big-city police leadership and a nationwide push for criminal justice reform.

 Even amid the coronavirus pandemic and orders that kept millions at home for weeks, police shot and killed 463 people through the first week of June — 49 more than the same period in 2019. In May, police shot and killed 110 people, the most in any one month since The Post began tracking such incidents.

Since The Post began tracking the shootings, black people have been shot and killed by police at disproportionate rates — both in terms of overall shootings and the shootings of unarmed Americans. The number of black and unarmed people fatally shot by police has declined since 2015, but whether armed or not, black people are still shot and killed at a disproportionately higher rate than white people.

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“The reduction in fatal shootings of unarmed suspects is much more of an important factor than the overall number,” said Geoffrey P. Alpert, a criminology professor at the University of South Carolina and co-author of “Evaluating Police Uses of Force.” “That shows real progress. . . . That probably is a better barometer of what’s going on with police in the black community than the total number of fatal shootings.”

Fatal police shootings are relatively rare events in a country where nearly 40,000 people die from firearms each year. Hundreds of thousands of police officers work in America, most of whom will never fire their guns on duty.

When fatal shootings occur, police officials often contend that officers, facing mortal threats, had to make split-second decisions to protect themselves and others. Police patrol a country with almost as many guns as people, and they never know if the next traffic stop, 911 call, or search warrant will be the one in which someone comes out shooting.

White people, who account for 60 percent of the American population, made up 45 percent of those shot and killed by police. Black people make up 13 percent of the population but account for 23 percent of those shot and killed by police. Hispanic people, who account for about 18 percent of the population, make up 16 percent of the people killed. For 9 percent of people, The Post was unable to determine their race.

Since 2005, 110 nonfederal law enforcement officers have been charged with murder or manslaughter for shooting someone on duty, Stinson’s records show. From those ranks, 42 officers were convicted of a crime — often a lesser offense — while 50 were not, their cases usually ending with acquittals or dismissals. More than a dozen cases are pending, according to Stinson.Policing has gotten safer in recent decades, with line-of-duty deaths dropping, records show. But police patrol a country with nearly one gun for every person.

Recent studies from professors at Harvard and Carnegie Mellon universities have found that areas with higher rates of gun ownership have higher rates of police shootings.

Another consistent statistic from The Post’s examination is the number of people killed by police while in mental distress. About 1 in 4 had some mental-health issues.

Advocates of police reform said part of the problem is the lack of a full, nationwide accounting of police use of force.

Government officials pledged years ago to start collecting more data on the use of force, but that effort has not produced any better awareness.

After The Post demonstrated a dramatic undercount by the FBI of fatal police shootings, the bureau’s then-director, James B. Comey, called the lack of federal data “embarrassing and ridiculous.”

An FBI policy board recommended that the agency track fatal and nonfatal shootings. The new effort was soon widened to catalogue all use-of-force incidents that result in serious bodily harm or death.

That data collection only began in earnest in January 2019. The program also suffers from some of the same shortfalls as the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program — chiefly that participation is voluntary. So far, only 40 percent of the 18,000 police departments nationwide submit data on police use-of-force incidents, according to the FBI.