Black people are 2.9 times more likely than white people to be killed by cops, report says
More than 1,300 people died at the hands of police in 2023, the most since the Mapping Police Violence project has kept records
Police across America killed a record 1,329 people in 2023, and Black people were nearly three times more likely to be slain than whites, according to the Mapping Police Violence project.
It’s the most deaths at the hands of police since the project began collecting data in 2013, when 1,079 people were killed, a chart on its website shows.
The project recorded police killed 1,329 people in 2023, up from 1,250 the previous year. Nearly nine of the 10 people who died were shot, and according to public records, body cameras recorded at least four out of 10 events, said Abdul Nasser Rad, managing director of research and data at Campaign Zero, which runs the violence project. That footage, USA Today noted, isn’t always released.
TheGrio, in conjunction with Big Local News at Stanford University, reported it can be difficult to obtain body cam footage from cops who use various methods to withhold it from the public.
The project noted police killed Black people on 197 days in 2023 and counted nearly 300 Black people slain. They were killed, the project said, in 35 states and the District of Columbia.
“It appears to me then that the only way to get this number down significantly would be to make more significant changes to, you know, what policing means in this country,” Justin Nix, a criminal justice professor at the University of Nebraska Omaha, told USA Today.
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Nix said he believes guns to be a factor in police shootings.
“When you ask human beings to go out and police a country awash with guns and train them and socialize them in their heads that a gun could be lurking around any corner, this is what you get,” Nix said.
Deaths in 2023 include Tyre Nichols, who died after Memphis cops severely beat him following a traffic stop; Dexter Wade, who died in Mississippi after a police officer in an SUV struck him with the vehicle and cops didn’t tell his mother what happened for months; and Steve Perkins, who police shot and killed in front of his Alabama home during a tow truck dispute.
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