How many unarmed black people are killled by police annually
Executive summary
Estimates from comprehensive databases show police kill roughly 1,000 people a year in recent years, and unarmed victims are a smaller but persistent subset — for example, The New York Times and Mapping Police Violence/other trackers put total police killings over 1,000 in recent years and counted dozens of unarmed deaths [1] [2] [3]. Reliable public databases such as The Washington Post and Mapping Police Violence allow filtering by armed status and race, and multiple analyses find Black people are disproportionately likely to be killed by police and are overrepresented among unarmed victims [1] [3] [4].
1. What the major databases report: scale and method
Two widely used projects — The Washington Post’s police shootings database and Mapping Police Violence — compile media reports, public records and official data to count police killings, because federal reporting is incomplete; those projects show roughly 1,000+ people killed by police annually and allow breakdowns by whether the victim was described as armed or unarmed [1] [3]. Mapping Police Violence and the Post use hand-curated records so their unarmed counts reflect publicly documented cases rather than relying on under‑reported federal statistics [1] [3].
2. How many unarmed Black people are killed each year: what sources say (and don’t)
Available public reporting does not produce a single, fixed annual number in the sources provided here; instead, databases and recent news analyses show that dozens of people described as unarmed are killed by police each year and that Black people comprise a disproportionate share of those unarmed victims [2] [3]. The New York Times’ analysis and Mapping Police Violence reported that in recent years the number of total police killings rose and that unarmed killings, while lower than at the 2020 peak, still occurred — for example, 53 unarmed people killed in one recent year cited by news analyses and 95 in 2020 [5] [2].
3. Disparities by race: consistent findings across studies
Multiple sources find Black Americans are killed by police at higher rates than their share of the population, and research shows Black victims are more likely to be unarmed relative to White victims in several datasets; academic work using the Post database reports Black victims are disproportionately male and more likely to be unarmed in many circumstances [1] [4] [3]. Mapping Police Violence and public-health analyses emphasize that “most unarmed people killed by police were people of color” and that Black people are more likely to be killed and more likely to be unarmed when killed [3] [4].
4. Trends since 2020: totals rose, unarmed counts fell from a peak
News analyses of recent years show total police killings climbed in the five years after George Floyd’s murder, even as lethal encounters with unarmed people fell from their 2020 peak; the Times reported an increase in total killings while noting fewer unarmed deaths compared with 2020 [2]. Mother Jones and other trackers cite 1,226 total police killings in a recent year and report 53 unarmed deaths that year versus 95 in 2020 — illustrating divergence between overall fatal encounters and the subset involving unarmed victims [5].
5. Why counts vary: definitions, sources and under‑reporting
Counts differ because “unarmed” depends on how each case is documented, and federal law-enforcement data are known to undercount police killings; outlets like The Washington Post and Mapping Police Violence use independent collection methods (media, records) which yield higher totals than federal reporting [1]. Academic work warns of analytic challenges — for example, varying armed-status classification, geographic differences, and case-only study designs that aim to control for reporting biases [4].
6. Health and social impacts beyond the tally
Public‑health analyses link police killings of unarmed Black people to broader harms: increases in poor mental health days, local emergency visits for depressive symptoms, and measurable effects on Black youth suicide in temporal analyses — underscoring that the impact extends beyond the individuals counted [6] [7]. The NAACP and other organizations frame these killings as recurrent, reporting that Black Americans are exposed to several unarmed police killings in their state per year on average, reflecting cumulative community trauma [8].
7. Competing viewpoints in the record
Some commentators argue there is no “epidemic” of fatal shootings of unarmed Black Americans and emphasize that most police shootings involve armed or dangerous suspects and that Black victims are a minority of total victims by count [9]. That position relies on the same databases but reaches different conclusions about scale and policy implications; the databases themselves document both the totals and the disproportionate Black involvement in those totals [1] [9].
Limitations and final note: available sources do not provide one definitive annual number of unarmed Black people killed by police; instead, they present curated databases and analyses showing dozens of unarmed deaths per year and consistent racial disparities [1] [3] [2]. For a precise current-year count filtered by race and armed status, consult the Washington Post or Mapping Police Violence interactive databases directly [1] [10].