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SINCE GEORGE FLOYD’S MURDER, POLICE KILLINGS KEEP RISING, NOT
FALLING  
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Steven Rich, Tim Arango, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Graphics by Daniel
Wood
May 24, 2025
The New York Times
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_ The number of people killed by the police has risen every year
since the murder of Mr. Floyd by a Minneapolis officer in 2020. _

People killed by the police since 2015 Killings of armed people have
increased, while killings of unarmed people have decreased. , Analysis
of data compiled by The Washington Post and Mapping Police Violence -
The New York Times

 

After a police officer killed George Floyd on a Minneapolis street
corner in 2020, millions of people flooded the streets of American
cities demanding an end to brutal police tactics that too often proved
fatal to those in custody.

Yet five years later, despite the largest racial justice protests
since the civil rights era of the 1960s and a wave of measures to
improve training and hold officers more accountable, the number of
people killed by the police continues to rise each year, and Black
Americans still die in disproportionate numbers.

Last year, the police killed at least 1,226 people, an 18 percent
increase over 2019, the year before Mr. Floyd was killed, according to
an analysis by The New York Times drawing on data compiled by The
Washington Post and the nonprofit Mapping Police Violence. The vast
majority of such cases have been shootings, and the vast majority of
the people killed were reported to be armed. But police officers, as
in the past, also killed people who had no weapon at all, some in the
same manner as Mr. Floyd: pinned down by an officer and yelling, “I
can’t breathe.”

Among them was Frank Tyson, an unarmed Black man in Canton, Ohio, who
uttered Mr. Floyd’s famous words last year before dying when he was
wrestled to the ground in a bar by police officers
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This happened even though police departments around the country,
especially in the aftermath of Mr. Floyd’s murder, have known about
the dangers of asphyxiation when keeping a suspect in the prone
position. (Two officers were charged with homicide in Mr. Tyson’s
death.)

Derek Chauvin, the officer who knelt on Mr. Floyd’s neck for more
than nine minutes as he gasped for air, was convicted and sentenced to
prison, along with three other officers who were on the scene. But
even as the number of police killings has risen in the years since, it
has remained exceedingly rare for officers to be charged with crimes
for those deaths.

Last year, for example, 16 officers were charged with either murder or
manslaughter in a fatal shooting, the same number as in 2020,
according to data tracked by Philip M. Stinson, a professor of
criminal justice at Bowling Green State University in Ohio.

Mr. Stinson said that given “all of the promise of five years ago,
in terms of the promises of police reform, from where I sit, the
reality is that policing hasn’t changed.”

Experts say it is difficult to draw definitive answers from the data
about why police killings continue to rise without an analysis of the
circumstances of each case. But they have plenty of theories about
what may have contributed to the problem.

An increasing number of guns in circulation heightens the chances of
deadly encounters. A backlash against the police reform movement in
conservative states may have empowered the police in those places. And
the decline in public trust in the police after Mr. Floyd’s murder
may have led to more deadly encounters.

“Public perception of policing can matter here,” said Seth
Stoughton, a former police officer who is a law professor at the
University of South Carolina and frequently testifies about
use-of-force policies in criminal trials of officers. “When police
are viewed as more legitimate, folks are more likely to comply. When
police are viewed as less legitimate, people are less likely to comply
and more likely to resist, and that can increase the rates of
violence.”

While answers may be elusive, here are some of the underlying trends
that might explain the shifting nature of police violence in the
United States.

A GROWING DIVIDE IN WHERE PEOPLE ARE GETTING KILLED BY THE POLICE

After Mr. Floyd’s killing, many Democratic-run states and cities
made more robust changes to policing. And culturally, in more-liberal
states, there were much louder calls for the police to be reined in.

This might help explain why there is a growing divide in where people
are being killed by the police. In more-liberal states, the rate has
stabilized, but in more-conservative ones, the numbers have risen.

If measured over the last 10 years, since the police killing of
Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014 sparked wide-scale protests,
fatal police shootings in more-Democratic states have declined 15
percent on a population-adjusted basis, with the rate holding
relatively steady since Mr. Floyd’s death.

But in Republican-leaning states, they have risen 23 percent. And
within those redder states, exurbs and rural areas, which tend to be
more conservative than cities, have the highest rates of police
killings.

 

Christina Beeler, a senior supervising attorney at the Texas Civil
Rights Project, said officials across that state had resisted efforts
to make police departments more accountable and transparent.

“The pendulum has swung back and, in some ways, has gone further
than where it was before,” she said.

FEWER PEOPLE WHO ARE KILLED BY THE POLICE ARE UNARMED

Even as police killings have risen in the years since the killing of
Mr. Floyd, killings of unarmed people have become less frequent.

The numbers have fluctuated over the years, but have dropped
significantly since 2015, when 152 people killed by the police were
unarmed. In 2020, that number was 95, and last year, it dropped to 53.
The number of people killed while wielding replica weapons, fake guns
that look like the real thing, has also dropped.

Still, experts were split on why the drop may have occurred and how
much weight to give the data. They said it was one of several
statistics that would benefit from a more comprehensive national
database of police use of force.

 

Some suggested the decrease in the number of unarmed people being
killed could be a natural outcome in a country where a large
percentage of people own guns. It is difficult to evaluate gun
ownership in the United States, but polls
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more than 40 percent of adults report having a gun in their household.

“In a world in which we are awash in guns, and getting more awash,
that’s what’s going to happen,” said Barry Friedman, a professor
at New York University’s law school who specializes in policing.

Others were more skeptical.

Justin Nix, an associate professor at the University of Nebraska,
Omaha, said he hoped that the data was a reflection of improvements in
policing and training, but that he was hesitant to draw any
conclusions. That’s in part because of how rare police killings of
unarmed people are and the fluctuating number of cases where it is
unclear whether the person who was killed had a weapon.

Mr. Nix, whose focus is on criminology and criminal justice, said the
difficulty in interpreting the data was indicative of a larger
problem, which is that data on police force and killings remains
sparse. For example, he noted, there is very little data on police
shootings in which a person is not killed. One study estimated
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there were roughly 800 of these nonfatal shootings each year.

THE OUTLOOK FOR POLICING OVERSIGHT

Despite the rise in the overall number of police killings, legislators
across the country have rolled back several attempts to reduce police
violence.

In Washington State, lawmakers passed an initiative
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year that rolled back a law, passed in 2021, that had imposed limits
on when the police could chase suspects in their cars. This year,
Alabama enacted a new law
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to prosecute or sue police officers. Oregon in 2022 loosened the
standard
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when the police could use tear gas after tightening regulations just a
year earlier.

The federal government, under the Trump administration, has also
pulled back from holding law enforcement agencies accountable.

This week, the Justice Department said it would no longer investigate
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oversee nearly two dozen police departments that were accused of civil
rights violations, including in Minneapolis and Louisville, Ky. And in
April, President Trump signed an executive order aimed at
“unleashing” law enforcement, including by directing the U.S.
attorney general to “provide legal resources” to defend police
officers accused of wrongdoing.

Mr. Nix, the criminal justice professor in Nebraska, said the demands
of constituents had changed in many places since the immediate
aftermath of Mr. Floyd’s death.

“The climate is perceived as a little bit more friendly to
policing,” he said. “Things that are perceived as unnecessarily
tying the hands of police, you’re going to see those get rolled
back.”

On the other hand, Mr. Nix said, many changes — including the use of
body cameras, transparency measures and training on de-escalation —
are focused on a broader range of goals than reducing police killings.
Some, for example, train the police in better empathizing with those
they encounter.

“In the aggregate, that spells better police-citizen
interactions,” he said. But he said any significant reduction in the
number of people killed by the police would require doing more than
just focusing on department policies and involve a host of “societal
factors that go way beyond the police.”

_Steven Rich [[link removed]] is a data
reporter at The Times, using data analysis to investigate major issues
and contextualize current events._

_Tim Arango [[link removed]] is a
correspondent covering national news. He is based in Los Angeles._

_Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs
[[link removed]] reports on
national stories across the United States with a focus on criminal
justice. He is from upstate New York._

* police killings
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* George Floyd
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* Homicide rates
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* Red States
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* racial disparities
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