Fact check: Which states have the highest rates of police killings of black people?

1. Where the data point a clear arrow: New Mexico tops the per-capita list

Mapping Police Violence’s 2024 analysis identifies New Mexico as the state with the highest per-capita rate of killings by police—13.7 per million in 2024—making it the single state with the greatest overall incidence in that year, and implying that policy and practice in some states produce much higher mortality burdens than in others ^{[1] [2]}. That report frames many of these deaths as potentially preventable, and highlights racial disparities in those outcomes, noting Black people were more likely to be killed, more likely to be unarmed, and less likely to pose a clear threat when killed. The Mapping Police Violence state comparison tool compiles data from 2013–2025 and supports cross-state comparisons, enabling users to see per-capita and racialized patterns that single-year tallies can obscure ^{[4] [1]}.

2. How big the racial gap is: Black people face roughly threefold risk

Multiple analyses converge on a broad national estimate: Black Americans are roughly 2.8–2.9 times more likely than White Americans to be killed by police, a ratio reported in Campaign Zero’s Mapping Police Violence analyses from 2024 and in earlier national summaries ^{[2] [3]}. Those ratios reflect aggregated national data rather than identical state-by-state patterns; some racial groups experience even larger disparities in certain locales, and Mapping Police Violence also reports that Native Hawaiian & Pacific Islanders faced the highest relative disparity nationally in their 2024 summary, at 7.6 times the White rate, illustrating that racialized risk is not uniform across groups or geographies ^{[2] [3]}.

3. State-by-state rankings: tools exist but the picture is nuanced

The Mapping Police Violence State Comparison Tool lets researchers and the public compare states on per-capita killings and racial disparities using data spanning 2013–2025, but several peer-reviewed and administrative sources caution that state rankings can depend heavily on methodology, time window, and denominators used ^{[4] [5] [6]}. A Lancet study covering 1980–2019 emphasized that age-standardized mortality from police violence was highest among non-Hispanic Black people and that substantial state variation exists, but did not provide a simple, definitive ranking of states for Black fatalities alone—highlighting tradeoffs between long-term standardized estimates and short-term per-capita counts that Mapping Police Violence emphasizes ^{[6] [4]}.

4. Data gaps, methodological choices, and what they mean for conclusions

Available datasets differ in scope and methods: Mapping Police Violence compiles comprehensive incident-level records and publishes state tools that produce per-capita and racialized rates, while other sources such as national trends summaries or law-enforcement accountability reports may not break out state-level Black fatality rates or may use different denominators and time frames ^{[4] [5] [7]}. These differences produce important uncertainty about whether a state’s placement at the top of a single-year list reflects a persistent pattern, a short-term spike, or reporting artifacts; consequently, any assertion about “highest rates” should specify the metric (per-capita in a single year versus age-standardized multi-decade mortality) and acknowledge measurement limits ^{[1] [6] [7]}.

5. Interpreting agendas and how to use these findings for policy scrutiny

Mapping Police Violence and Campaign Zero are advocacy-oriented projects that publish rigorously compiled incident data and explicit policy recommendations; their framing emphasizes preventability and racial inequity, and that perspective shapes which metrics are highlighted—single-year per-capita rates and racial disparity ratios being prominent ^{[2] [1]}. Peer-reviewed work such as the Lancet study situates police violence within long-term mortality trends and uses age-standardization, reflecting an academic lens that privileges stability over year-to-year fluctuation ^[6]. Policymakers and journalists should use both kinds of outputs: the incident-level, recent-per-capita snapshots to flag urgent hotspots like New Mexico in 2024, and the standardized, longitudinal studies to assess entrenched inequities across states over decades.