How many black v white people has police killed in us in recent years

1. What the counts actually show: yearly totals and racial breakdowns

Multiple contemporary datasets put the national annual total of people killed by police close to 1,000 per year: a Johns Hopkins–Vanderbilt analysis of the Gun Violence Archive found an average of about 979 fatal injuries per year from police shootings in 2015–2020 (the study identified an average 1,769 police shooting injuries annually of which 55% were fatal) ^[1], while long‑running trackers such as The Washington Post and MappingPoliceViolence report totals in the same general range and classify race for most cases ^{[4] [5]}. Using those datasets, recent multi‑year averages show roughly 400–500 White victims annually (MappingPoliceViolence’s summary of recent years) and Black victims making up roughly a quarter of fatalities—about 240–300 per year if the annual total is ~1,000 ^{[2] [3]}.

2. Why the headline numbers understate racial disproportionality

Raw counts mask the disparity: Black Americans are killed at a rate far higher than White Americans relative to population size. The Washington Post’s tracking emphasizes that although roughly half of victims are White, Black Americans (about 13% of the U.S. population) are shot and killed at more than twice the rate of White Americans ^[4]. Scholarly analyses find even larger gaps for particular subgroups: one multi‑study synthesis reports Black men face between roughly 3.2 and 3.5 times the risk of being killed by police compared with White men in some analyses ^{[3] [6]}.

3. Complexities and contested interpretations in the data

Scholars and commentators disagree about causes and how to interpret categories: some research highlights place, social vulnerability, and policing practices as drivers of fatal shootings (social‑vulnerability and place analyses) ^[7], while other writers point to compositional differences in mental‑health crises and “suicide by cop” signals that are more common in White victims as partial explanations for some of the White deaths (about 30% of White victims versus 16% of Black victims showed signs of mental illness in one Washington Post tally cited by the Manhattan Institute) ^[8]. These competing frames do not negate the documented Black overrepresentation but matter for policy and intervention design.

4. The data are imperfect: undercounts, unknown race, and divergent methods

All major accounts caution that official federal reporting is incomplete and private databases fill the gap, producing differing totals and race coding; for example, the FBI historically undercounted shootings and many local agencies do not reliably report to federal systems, forcing journalists and researchers to aggregate news reports and local records ^{[9] [4]}. MappingPoliceViolence notes growth in “unknown ethnicity” entries in some years, and researchers warn that omissions and classification errors (including death‑certificate miscoding) can bias estimates of both totals and racial shares ^{[2] [9]}.

5. Bottom line and what remains unresolved

The most defensible statement from the available reporting: U.S. police kill roughly 900–1,100 people per year; Whites are the largest numerical group of victims (about 400–500 per year), but Black Americans are killed at a much higher rate relative to their share of the population—commonly reported as more than twice the White rate and, for Black men in some studies, three times or more the risk—while methodological gaps, reporting shortfalls, and contested causal explanations leave important details unsettled ^{[1] [2] [4] [3]}.