According to a survey, US police officers on duty killed more people in 2022 than in any of the previous ten years. The non-profit initiative Mapping Police Violence has tracked 1,176 cases of police officers on duty killing one person in the United States — more than three a day. In 2021 this had been 1145. 24 percent of those killed were black, even though they make up only 13 percent of the total population.
Since the statistics began to be collected in 2013, charges have been brought against police officers in less than two percent of cases, the activists against police violence reported. Only in about a third of the cases was the assault after a suspected violent crime, in most cases people were killed, for example, during traffic stops, after disturbing public order or after mental health checks. The statistics register both victims killed with and without weapons, but not accidents, the authors explain on their website.
The “Washington Post” has also been researching deaths from police violence since 2015, but only records those who died from firearms. According to the newspaper, there were 1090 such cases in 2022 – this is also a maximum since the statistics began.
In 2019, a Rutgers University study found that on average, one in 1,000 black men in the United States is killed by police officers. For non-whites, police violence is one of the leading causes of death in the United States, according to work published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
