Ten years after Ferguson, data on police killings shows a lack of progress
“Police violence hasn’t stopped,” said Sirry Alang, professor of Black communities and social determinants of health at the University of Pittsburgh. “It hasn’t decreased, despite all of the attention that we’ve had, socially or politically.”
Brown’s shooting by a police officer on Aug. 9, 2014, led to more than 11 days of protests in Ferguson and came just over three weeks after another Black man, Eric Garner, was killed during an encounter with police in New York. Both Brown and Garner were unarmed.
A 2021 study of police killings by a researcher at the University of North Carolina found that Black victims were less likely to have exhibited mental illness, less likely to have been armed, and more likely to have been attempting to flee compared to their white counterparts.
A grand jury declined to indict the officer who shot Brown, 18, despite the public outcry. And in the decade since, data shows there has not been an increase in charges brought against officers.
Philip Stinson, a professor of criminal justice at Bowling Green State University, has tracked cases of police officers charged with murder or manslaughter resulting from on-duty shootings since 2005. Though his numbers show prosecutors taking up more cases in recent years, Stinson told NBC News the totals are inflated due to numerous instances in which multiple officers were charged over the same incident.
“What I can say is that nothing has changed in the past decade in terms of any statistically significant change in officers being charged with murder or manslaughter resulting from on-duty shooting, and can also say that on-duty police are still killing 900 to 1,100+ people each and every year in this country,” Stinson wrote in an email. “In those regards, policing has not changed and reform efforts have been ineffective in changing those two facts.”
The Mapping Police Violence database is maintained by the police reform nonprofit Campaign Zero, which has been gathering data since 2015. Data is aggregated from publicly accessible media sources and reviewed by Campaign Zero’s researchers. The database shows that documented police killings have steadily increased in recent years.
More than 790 people have been reported killed by law enforcement so far this year, the highest count recorded at this point in a year to date. A similar database from The Washington Post has shown comparable trends.
