Black People Killed by Police: Data, Immunity, and Reform

Black Americans killed by police in 2025 died at 2.6 times the rate of white Americans, a disparity that has held steady for as long as anyone has kept count.¹ Roughly 1 in 1,000 Black men and boys will be killed by police during their lifetimes, according to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences — a rate 2.5 times higher than that faced by white men and boys.² The officers who cause these deaths are prosecuted in only a small fraction of cases, and the federal apparatus built to track and constrain police violence is being dismantled.

How Often It Happens and to Whom

Police killed at least 1,314 people in the United States in 2025, an average of 3.6 people a day. There were only six days all year on which no one was killed by law enforcement. The total was down about 5 percent from 2024’s 1,383 deaths, the highest figure Mapping Police Violence has recorded since it began tracking the data.³

Broken down by race, the per-capita rates tell the clearest story. Black Americans were killed at 0.75 per 100,000; white Americans, at 0.29. Hispanic Americans were killed at 0.37 per 100,000, and Asian Americans at 0.08. Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander individuals faced the highest rate of any group at 1.59, followed by American Indian and Alaska Native individuals at 0.86.³

Black people make up about 12 to 14 percent of the U.S. population but accounted for 26 percent of everyone killed by police in 2025.⁴ New Mexico had the highest per-capita rate of any state at 1.36 per 100,000; Rhode Island was the only state where police killed no one in 2025.⁵

The lifetime risk figures put the annual counts in context. The PNAS study by researchers Frank Edwards, Hedwig Lee, and Michael Esposito, based on data from 2013 to 2018, found that police use of force accounted for 1.6 percent of all deaths of Black men aged 20 to 24, compared with 0.5 percent for white men in the same age range. For young men of color, the researchers concluded, being killed by police is among the leading causes of death.⁶ Risk peaks between ages 20 and 35 for every racial group, and men are killed at far higher rates than women — though Black women still face roughly 1.4 times the risk of white women.²

Unarmed Deaths and Mental Health Calls

About 22 percent of people killed by police in 2025 were unarmed. Roughly 52 percent were reportedly armed with a firearm.³ Among unarmed victims, Black people were disproportionately represented and were less likely than white victims to have been threatening anyone at the time they were killed.⁴

Mental health calls are another category where the risk of a fatal outcome is high. In 2025, 116 people were killed after officers responded to reports of someone behaving erratically or in a mental health crisis. Overall, 67 percent of police killings that year came out of traffic stops, mental health calls, or situations where the person was not reportedly threatening anyone with a gun.⁷

Why Officers Rarely Face Charges

Criminal prosecution of officers who kill civilians is uncommon. As of early 2026, officers had been charged in 15 of the fatal incidents from 2025. The overall charge rate has risen from about 2 percent a decade ago to roughly 4 percent today, but the great majority of officers who kill someone on duty are never prosecuted.³

An NPR investigation cited by the Equal Justice Initiative examined 135 cases of unarmed Black civilians fatally shot by police between 2015 and early 2021. Officers were not charged in more than 80 of them. Of 13 officers charged with murder, two were convicted. Of seven charged with manslaughter, two were convicted. In 33 cases, officers were fired or resigned, but at least three regained their positions and five moved to other law enforcement agencies. At least 15 of those officers had been involved in more than one shooting during their careers.⁸

Older figures follow the same pattern. Between 2005 and 2015, only 54 officers were charged nationwide despite thousands of police-involved killings. In Dallas, grand juries declined to indict 174 of 175 officers investigated between 2008 and 2012. The Bureau of Justice Statistics found that 92 percent of use-of-force complaints filed with large agencies were dismissed.⁹

Qualified Immunity

Civil lawsuits face a separate obstacle. Qualified immunity, a judicially created doctrine, shields government officials from civil suits unless they violated a “clearly established” constitutional right. Only Congress or the Supreme Court can end the doctrine at the federal level, and neither has. The Court has repeatedly declined to reconsider it.

Four states — Colorado, Montana, Nevada, and New Mexico — have fully barred officers from raising qualified immunity as a defense in state court.¹⁰ Colorado’s Enhance Law Enforcement Integrity Act goes further, exposing officers to personal financial liability of up to $25,000 of a judgment if their department finds they did not reasonably and in good faith believe their actions were lawful.¹¹ Other states moved the other way. Iowa broadened qualified immunity in 2021, granting blanket immunity to officers and municipalities unless the right violated was clearly established. Connecticut kept a good-faith defense. Massachusetts limited the exclusion of qualified immunity to cases where an officer has been decertified.¹²

The Sonya Massey Case

One recent case shows what accountability looks like when it does arrive. Sonya Massey, a 36-year-old unarmed Black woman, was killed at her home in Woodside Township, Illinois, on July 6, 2024, after calling 911 to report a suspected intruder. Deputies searched the home and found no one. An encounter between Massey and Sangamon County Sheriff’s Deputy Sean Grayson then escalated, and body camera footage captured Grayson threatening Massey and shooting her three times, with one round striking her in the head, after she held a pot of hot water near her stove.¹³

Grayson was charged with first-degree murder, aggravated battery with a firearm, and official misconduct. A jury convicted him of the lesser charge of second-degree murder in October 2025, and in January 2026 he was sentenced to the maximum of 20 years, though he could be released in about eight and a half years with good behavior and credit for time served. Massey’s family reached a $10 million settlement with Sangamon County and has called for federal civil rights charges.¹⁴

Why the Real Numbers Are Hard to Know

Every figure above comes with an asterisk, because the federal government has never maintained a comprehensive database of people killed by police. The FBI’s National Use-of-Force Data Collection, launched in 2019, depends on voluntary participation. As of August 2025, participating agencies covered 78 percent of the total law enforcement population, below the 80 percent threshold the FBI requires before releasing full incident-level data.¹⁵ The FBI describes its own collection as offering “big-picture insights” rather than incident detail, and it does not assess whether any officer’s actions were lawful.¹⁶

The gap is why the widely cited counts come from journalists and advocacy groups. The Washington Post’s Fatal Force database has documented more than twice as many fatal shootings by police as federal officials recorded on average per year. By 2021, the FBI was tracking only about a third of departments’ fatal shootings.¹⁷ The Post’s database is limited to fatal shootings by on-duty officers; it excludes deaths in custody, non-shooting deaths, and off-duty incidents.¹⁸ Mapping Police Violence, run by Campaign Zero, aims at a broader count that includes all police-caused deaths, and its totals run higher.

Congress did pass legislation aimed at fixing this. The Death in Custody Reporting Act of 2013 requires states to report deaths during arrest or in custody, with noncompliant states risking up to 10 percent of their federal justice grant funding. In practice, federal collection has been dogged by inconsistent participation.¹⁹

What Changed After 2020, and What’s Being Undone

The police killing of George Floyd in May 2020 drove what researchers have called the largest protest movement in U.S. history, with an estimated 15 million to 26 million participants.²⁰ According to the Stanford Center for Racial Justice, 45 states enacted reform-oriented policing laws after 2020, and at least 31 passed legislation addressing use of force. Among the 100 largest U.S. cities, the share of police departments prohibiting chokeholds rose from 22 percent to 92 percent between 2015 and 2025, and departments with duty-to-intervene policies climbed from 29 percent to 93 percent.²¹ Nine states and Washington, D.C. enacted complete chokehold bans, 12 states and D.C. created a legal duty to intervene, and 14 states established or strengthened processes to decertify officers who commit misconduct.²²

Federal reform has since been reversed. Hours into his second term on January 20, 2025, President Trump revoked President Biden’s May 2022 executive order, which had limited federal officers’ use of force to a last resort, curtailed no-knock warrants and chokeholds, mandated body cameras, restricted military equipment transfers to local police, and created the National Law Enforcement Accountability Database.²³ The misconduct database, launched in December 2023 to let agencies background-check federal officers for prior misconduct, was decommissioned the same day.²⁴ The independent National Decertification Index, which tracks state and local decertifications and is not run by the federal government, remains operational.²⁵

In April 2025, President Trump signed an executive order directing the Attorney General to review and move to conclude federal consent decrees and agreements with local police departments that “unduly impede” law enforcement. The order also expanded military equipment transfers to local agencies and directed the creation of legal resources and indemnification for officers who “unjustly incur expenses and liabilities” while on duty.²⁶ On May 21, 2025, the Department of Justice announced it was dismissing consent decree lawsuits against the Minneapolis and Louisville police departments and closing investigations into the police departments of Phoenix, Trenton, Memphis, Mount Vernon, Oklahoma City, and the Louisiana State Police. The department retracted its previous findings of constitutional violations for each of those agencies. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon called the prior consent decrees “factually unjustified” and “overbroad.”²⁷ The NAACP Legal Defense Fund called the decision “an unprecedented abandonment of the Department of Justice’s responsibility to enforce civil rights laws.”²⁸

The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which would lower the legal threshold for prosecuting officers from “willfulness” to “recklessness,” reform qualified immunity, ban chokeholds and no-knock warrants in drug cases, change the federal use-of-force standard from “reasonable” to “necessary,” and create a national police misconduct registry, was reintroduced in September 2025 as H.R. 5361 with 122 cosponsors. It has never passed the Senate, and its prospects in the current Congress are widely considered dim.²⁹

1
Campaign Zero. Mapping Police Violence: For the First Time in Six Years, Police Violence Declined in 2025
2
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Risk of Being Killed by Police Use of Force in the United States by Age, Race-Ethnicity, and Sex
3
Mapping Police Violence. Year-End Report 2025
4
Davis Vanguard. Police Violence Report 2025
5
Stateline. Fatal Police Violence May Have Declined for the First Time in Years
6
Los Angeles Times. Police Shootings Are a Leading Cause of Death for Black Men
7
Police Violence Report. 2025 Police Violence Report
8
Equal Justice Initiative. Lack of Accountability for Police Who Kill Unarmed Black People Persists
9
American Civil Liberties Union. IACHR Hearing Written Submission
10
Institute for Justice. Qualified Immunity State Reforms
11
Columbia Journal of Law and Social Problems. Colorado’s Enhance Law Enforcement Integrity Act
12
State Court Report. Legislative Efforts to Abolish Qualified Immunity Yield Mixed Results
13
The Trace. Sonya Massey Sean Grayson Sentencing
14
Capitol News Illinois. Sean Grayson Receives Maximum Sentence for Murder of Sonya Massey
15
FBI. FBI Releases Use-of-Force Data Update
16
FBI. National Use-of-Force Data Collection
17
Washington Post. Fatal Force Database
18
GitHub. Washington Post Data Police Shootings README
19
Bureau of Justice Statistics. Use of Force
20
Georgetown Law. #BlackLivesMatter: From Protest to Policy
21
Stanford Center for Racial Justice. Police Use of Force Policies Across America
22
Brennan Center for Justice. State Policing Reforms Since George Floyd’s Murder
23
Brennan Center for Justice. Trump Reverses Biden Directive on Policing Reforms
24
Bureau of Justice Statistics. National Law Enforcement Accountability Database
25
NPR. Trump Police Misconduct Database Background Checks
26
White House. Strengthening and Unleashing America’s Law Enforcement
27
Department of Justice. Civil Rights Division Dismisses Biden-Era Police Investigations
28
NAACP Legal Defense Fund. LDF Denounces Department of Justice’s Decision to Reject Police Accountability
29
Office of Congressman Glenn Ivey. Congressman Glenn Ivey Announces Re-Introduction of the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act