Police killings in the United States

Below are lists of people killed by law enforcement in the United States, both on duty and off, and regardless of reason or method. Inclusion in the lists implies neither wrongdoing nor justification on the part of the person killed or the officer involved; the listing merely documents the occurrence of a death.

These lists are incomplete. Although Congress instructed the Attorney General in 1994 to compile and publish annual statistics on police use of excessive force, this was never carried out, and the FBI does not collect these data either. The annual average number of justifiable homicides alone was previously estimated to be near 400. Updated estimates from the Bureau of Justice Statistics released in 2015 estimate the number to be around 930 per year, or 1240 if assuming that nonreporting local agencies kill people at the same rate as reporting agencies.The Washington Post has tracked shootings (only) since 2015, reporting 990 shootings in that year, and more than 250 by the end of March 2016.

The Guardian newspaper runs its own database, The Counted, which tracked US killings by police and other law enforcement agencies in 2015, and counted 1140 killed, with rates per million of 2.92 for "White" people, 7.2 for "Black", and 3.5 for "Hispanic/Latino", 1.34 for "Asian/Pacific Islander", and 3.4 for "Native American". The database can be viewed by state, gender (1086 male, 53 female, 1 nonconforming) , race/ethnicity, age, classification (e.g., "gunshot"), and whether the person killed was armed (853 armed, 224 unarmed). The database has continued to add new cases into 2016.

Projects on police killings in the United States by The Washington Post and The Guardian were finalists for the 2016 Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting.

Within the limits set by the U.S. Supreme Court in Tennessee v. Garner, authority to use deadly force in the line of duty is granted by state law to state and local law enforcement agencies. Individual agencies set policies and procedures regarding when and how to use deadly force. This case also set forth that deadly force is not justifiable simply to prevent a fleeing suspect's escape if the suspect does not pose a significant threat of death or serious harm to others. Matthew Cooke, Writer-Director of the film How To Make Money Selling Drugs, reports in a blog entitled "Survivors Guide to Earth: Police Shootings," that "Amnesty International found not a single state in the U.S. has laws that meet international human rights standards for 'use of force' by police officers," and that only eight states in the United States require a verbal warning by police officers before shooting.

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