According to a study conducted by the Mapping Police Violence Project, American police killed an unprecedented number of civilians between 2023 and 2025.
The project, which has tracked police killings in the United States since 2013, says that 1,329 people were killed by officers last year. This represents a nearly 19% increase over 11 years.
The Mapping Police Violence Project only counted the bodies. No records were kept that indicated how many of those who died were armed or how many had fired at the police. Around 25% of all reported law enforcement encounters resulted in the death of a civilian involving mentally ill individuals.
According to The Hill’s project, police killings are defined as “any incident in which a law enforcement official (on or off duty) uses lethal force on a civil resulting in that civilian being killed.”
“We’ve seen crime levels stay the same or even increase a bit when crime is falling or increasing.” Justin Nix is a professor of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska Omaha. He said that it was persistent during a pandemic when people stayed home for weeks or months. “It seems to me that the only real way to reduce this number would be by making more substantial changes to what policing is in this country.”
Wait, what? What if the number of deaths at police hands increases or decreases when crime goes up or down a bit? Huh? What?
I have a headache
Abdul Nasser Rad believes that better data collection needs to be done.
USA Today
Rad stated that racial disparities from previous years also persist at the same rate. Black people were three times as likely to be killed in police shootings than white people. Rad said that race was one of the most difficult variables to track, and in over 20% of encounters, the race of the victim killed wasn’t known.
We don’t even know the 20%.
Professor Nix was not done trying to confuse the issue of police killings.
Nix explained: “This is what happens when you ask people to police a nation awash in guns, and you train and socialize their minds that a weapon could lurk around every corner.”
Because they are, officers are taught to believe that there are guns “lurking everywhere”. We would have had hundreds more police killed without such training.
The police are not respected in this country and they do not respect the laws that they enforce. Taking away the guns of the cops would be the least effective way to maintain law and safety.
