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Fact check: How do police killing rates compare between black and white people in the US per capita?
Executive Summary
Black Americans face substantially higher per-capita rates of lethal force by U.S. police than White Americans across multiple analyses, with contemporary counts indicating roughly 2.9 to 3+ times greater likelihood of being killed by police for Black people compared with White people. Longitudinal, age-standardized research and recent incident databases converge on persistent racial gaps, though estimates vary by methodology, time period, and data source — from analyses focused on 2024 counts to studies covering 1980–2019 — underscoring both consistent disparity and methodological uncertainty in exact multipliers [1] [2] [3].
1. Shocking Snapshot: Recent counts show Black people nearly three times as likely to die in police encounters
Campaign Zero’s 2024-focused analysis reports that Black people were 2.9 times more likely than White people to be killed by police in the U.S., and that Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander and American Indian/Alaska Native groups experience even larger disparities in some measures (7.6 and 3.1 times respectively) [1]. This recent-count approach relies on compiled fatal-encounter databases and is designed to reflect the most current calendar-year incident patterns; it emphasizes that racial disparities in police killings remain large and acute in contemporary data [1]. The Campaign Zero figures highlight the lived, immediate impact of police violence disparities and show variation across racial groups that a single Black/White comparison can obscure, while signaling the need to examine both national totals and subgroup-specific risks.
2. Deep history: Long-term, age-standardized mortality rates tell a consistent story of higher Black risk
A peer-reviewed, long-range analysis published through 2018 found that the age-standardized mortality rate from police violence was highest among non-Hispanic Black people at 0.69 per 100,000, compared with 0.20 per 100,000 for non-Hispanic White people — roughly a 3.5-fold difference over the multi-decade period [2]. This study’s strength is in standardizing for age and spanning decades (1980–2018), which reduces distortions from population age-structure differences and year-to-year volatility. The long-term perspective confirms that disparities are not a short-term aberration but a persistent, measurable public-health inequality across time and place [2], even as annual multipliers shift with incident rates and reporting practices.
3. Method matters: Databases, reporting systems, and definitions change the headline ratio
Different data systems produce different estimates: contemporary compiled databases like those used for 2017–2024 fatal shooting rates yield figures such as 6.1 per million per year for Black Americans for some periods [3], while reporting-completeness studies show federal systems undercount legal intervention deaths relative to specialized surveillance like the NVDRS (National Violent Death Reporting System) [4]. These methodological differences mean headline multipliers (2.9x, 3.5x, etc.) depend on how deaths are counted, whether rates are age-standardized, and which years or jurisdictions are included. Highlighting that variation is crucial: it shows the disparity is robust across methods, even if the exact factor fluctuates with data source and analytic choices [3] [4].
4. Context and drivers: Place, social vulnerability, and policy shape racial patterns in police killings
Studies link fatal police shootings to social vulnerability and place, finding that high social-vulnerability areas show disproportionately larger increases in fatal police shootings for Black residents (one study reported a 20.4-fold increase tied to high-SVI zip codes for Blacks) [5]. Analyses also point to departmental policies, individual-level discrimination, and institutional practices as mechanisms that reproduce disparities, and policy reforms and improved use-of-force tracking are frequently offered as remedies [6]. An alternative empirical view finds racial differences in non-lethal force but contests differences in officer-involved shootings after accounting for contextual factors, suggesting heterogeneous causal explanations and the need for granular, place-based investigation [7].
5. The verdict: Disparity is undeniable; precise magnitude depends on scope and method
Across contemporary counts, long-term mortality studies, and methodological critiques, the evidence converges on a clear conclusion: Black Americans are killed by police at substantially higher per-capita rates than White Americans, with typical multipliers clustered around roughly 3x but ranging higher or lower depending on data choices [1] [2] [3]. Differences in reporting completeness, age standardization, geographic concentration, and how “police killing” is defined account for variation between studies [4]. Policymakers, researchers, and the public should treat the disparity as a persistent public-health and criminal-justice problem that merits targeted data-improvement efforts and place-sensitive policy responses to address both immediate incident prevention and the structural conditions that amplify risk [6] [5].