The Washington Post's database contains records of every fatal shooting in the United States by a police officer in the line of duty since Jan. 1, 2015.
In 2015, The Post began tracking more than a dozen details about each killing — including the race of the deceased, the circumstances of the shooting, whether the person was armed and whether the person was experiencing a mental-health crisis — by culling local news reports, law enforcement websites and social media, and by monitoring independent databases such as Killed by Police and Fatal Encounters. The Post conducted additional reporting in many cases.
[Explore the interactive database]
The Post is documenting only those shootings in which a police officer, in the line of duty, shoots and kills a civilian — the circumstances that most closely parallel the 2014 killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., which began the protest movement culminating in Black Lives Matter and an increased focus on police accountability nationwide. The Post is not tracking deaths of people in police custody, fatal shootings by off-duty officers or non-shooting deaths.
The FBI and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention log fatal shootings by police, but officials acknowledge that their data is incomplete. Since 2015, The Post has documented more than twice as many fatal shootings by police as recorded on average annually.
The Post’s database is updated regularly as fatal shootings are reported and as facts emerge about individual cases. The Post seeks to make the database as comprehensive as possible. To provide information about fatal police shootings since Jan. 1, 2015, send us an email at [email protected].
The file fatal-police-shootings-data.csv contains data about each fatal shooting in CSV format. The file can be downloaded at this URL. Each row has the following variables:
id: a unique identifier for each victim
name: the name of the victim
date: the date of the fatal shooting in YYYY-MM-DD format
manner_of_death:
shotshot and Tasered
armed: indicates that the victim was armed with some sort of implement that a police officer believed could inflict harm
undetermined: it is not known whether or not the victim had a weaponunknown: the victim was armed, but it is not known what the object wasunarmed: the victim was not armed
age: the age of the victim
gender: the gender of the victim. The Post identifies victims by the gender they identify with if reports indicate that it differs from their biological sex.
M: MaleF: FemaleNone: unknown
race:
W: White, non-HispanicB: Black, non-HispanicA: AsianN: Native AmericanH: HispanicO: OtherNone: unknown
city: the municipality where the fatal shooting took place. Note that in some cases this field may contain a county name if a more specific municipality is unavailable or unknown.
state: two-letter postal code abbreviation
signs of mental illness: News reports have indicated the victim had a history of mental health issues, expressed suicidal intentions or was experiencing mental distress at the time of the shooting.
threat_level: The threat_level column was used to flag incidents for the story by Amy Brittain in October 2015. http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/2015/10/24/on-duty-under-fire/ As described in the story, the general criteria for the attack label was that there was the most direct and immediate threat to life. That would include incidents where officers or others were shot at, threatened with a gun, attacked with other weapons or physical force, etc. The attack category is meant to flag the highest level of threat. The other and undetermined categories represent all remaining cases. Other includes many incidents where officers or others faced significant threats.
flee: News reports have indicated the victim was moving away from officers
FootCarNot fleeing
The threat column and the fleeing column are not necessarily related. For example, there is an incident in which the suspect is fleeing and at the same time turns to fire at gun at the officer. Also, attacks represent a status immediately before fatal shots by police while fleeing could begin slightly earlier and involve a chase.
body_camera: News reports have indicated an officer was wearing a body camera and it may have recorded some portion of the incident.
latitude and longitude: the location of the shooting expressed as WGS84 coordinates, geocoded from addresses. The coordinates are rounded to 3 decimal places, meaning they have a precision of about 80-100 meters within the contiguous U.S.
is_geocoding_exact: reflects the accuracy of the coordinates. true means that the coordinates are for the location of the shooting (within approximately 100 meters), while false means that coordinates are for the centroid of a larger region, such as the city or county where the shooting happened.
We welcome assistance in making the our data as complete and accurate as possible. The best way to contribute to the data, make suggestions or provide information about fatal police shootings since Jan. 1, 2015, is to send us an email at [email protected]. Please note that we do not accept pull requests as the data file is generated downstream of our internal database.
The data is published under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license.
Contact [email protected] with any questions about the data, feedback, updated information or corrections.
Research and reporting: Julie Tate, Jennifer Jenkins and Steven Rich
Database development: John Muyskens