After a police officer killed George Floyd on a Minneapolis street corner in 2020, millions of people flooded the streets of American cities demanding an end to brutal police tactics that too often proved fatal to those in custody.
Yet five years later, despite the largest racial justice protests since the civil rights era of the 1960s and a wave of measures to improve training and hold officers more accountable, the number of people killed by the police continues to rise each year, and Black Americans still die in disproportionate numbers.
Last year, the police killed at least 1,226 people, an 18 percent increase over 2019, the year before Mr. Floyd was killed, according to an analysis by The New York Times drawing on data compiled by The Washington Post and the nonprofit Mapping Police Violence. The vast majority of such cases have been shootings, and the vast majority of the people killed were reported to be armed. But police officers, as in the past, also killed people who had no weapon at all, some in the same manner as Mr. Floyd: pinned down by an officer and yelling, “I can’t breathe.”
Among them was Frank Tyson, an unarmed Black man in Canton, Ohio, who uttered Mr. Floyd’s famous words last year before dying when he was wrestled to the ground in a bar by police officers. This happened even though police departments around the country, especially in the aftermath of Mr. Floyd’s murder, have known about the dangers of asphyxiation when keeping a suspect in the prone position. (Two officers were charged with homicide in Mr. Tyson’s death.)
Derek Chauvin, the officer who knelt on Mr. Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes as he gasped for air, was convicted and sentenced to prison, along with three other officers who were on the scene. But even as the number of police killings has risen in the years since, it has remained exceedingly rare for officers to be charged with crimes for those deaths.
Last year, for example, 16 officers were charged with either murder or manslaughter in a fatal shooting, the same number as in 2020, according to data tracked by Philip M. Stinson, a professor of criminal justice at Bowling Green State University in Ohio.
Mr. Stinson said that given “all of the promise of five years ago, in terms of the promises of police reform, from where I sit, the reality is that policing hasn’t changed.”
Experts say it is difficult to draw definitive answers from the data about why police killings continue to rise without an analysis of the circumstances of each case. But they have plenty of theories about what may have contributed to the problem.
An increasing number of guns in circulation heightens the chances of deadly encounters. A backlash against the police reform movement in conservative states may have empowered the police in those places. And the decline in public trust in the police after Mr. Floyd’s murder may have led to more deadly encounters.
“Public perception of policing can matter here,” said Seth Stoughton, a former police officer who is a law professor at the University of South Carolina and frequently testifies about use-of-force policies in criminal trials of officers. “When police are viewed as more legitimate, folks are more likely to comply. When police are viewed as less legitimate, people are less likely to comply and more likely to resist, and that can increase the rates of violence.”
While answers may be elusive, here are some of the underlying trends that might explain the shifting nature of police violence in the United States.
A Growing Divide in Where People Are Getting Killed by the Police
After Mr. Floyd’s killing, many Democratic-run states and cities made more robust changes to policing. And culturally, in more-liberal states, there were much louder calls for the police to be reined in.
This might help explain why there is a growing divide in where people are being killed by the police. In more-liberal states, the rate has stabilized, but in more-conservative ones, the numbers have risen.
If measured over the last 10 years, since the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014 sparked wide-scale protests, fatal police shootings in more-Democratic states have declined 15 percent on a population-adjusted basis, with the rate holding relatively steady since Mr. Floyd’s death.
But in Republican-leaning states, they have risen 23 percent. And within those redder states, exurbs and rural areas, which tend to be more conservative than cities, have the highest rates of police killings.
Christina Beeler, a senior supervising attorney at the Texas Civil Rights Project, said officials across that state had resisted efforts to make police departments more accountable and transparent.
“The pendulum has swung back and, in some ways, has gone further than where it was before,” she said.
Fewer People Who Are Killed by the Police Are Unarmed
Even as police killings have risen in the years since the killing of Mr. Floyd, killings of unarmed people have become less frequent.
The numbers have fluctuated over the years, but have dropped significantly since 2015, when 152 people killed by the police were unarmed. In 2020, that number was 95, and last year, it dropped to 53. The number of people killed while wielding replica weapons, fake guns that look like the real thing, has also dropped.
Still, experts were split on why the drop may have occurred and how much weight to give the data. They said it was one of several statistics that would benefit from a more comprehensive national database of police use of force.
Some suggested the decrease in the number of unarmed people being killed could be a natural outcome in a country where a large percentage of people own guns. It is difficult to evaluate gun ownership in the United States, but polls have shown that more than 40 percent of adults report having a gun in their household.
“In a world in which we are awash in guns, and getting more awash, that’s what’s going to happen,” said Barry Friedman, a professor at New York University’s law school who specializes in policing.
Others were more skeptical.
Justin Nix, an associate professor at the University of Nebraska, Omaha, said he hoped that the data was a reflection of improvements in policing and training, but that he was hesitant to draw any conclusions. That’s in part because of how rare police killings of unarmed people are and the fluctuating number of cases where it is unclear whether the person who was killed had a weapon.
Mr. Nix, whose focus is on criminology and criminal justice, said the difficulty in interpreting the data was indicative of a larger problem, which is that data on police force and killings remains sparse. For example, he noted, there is very little data on police shootings in which a person is not killed. One study estimated that there were roughly 800 of these nonfatal shootings each year.
The Outlook for Policing Oversight
Despite the rise in the overall number of police killings, legislators across the country have rolled back several attempts to reduce police violence.
In Washington State, lawmakers passed an initiative last year that rolled back a law, passed in 2021, that had imposed limits on when the police could chase suspects in their cars. This year, Alabama enacted a new law seeking to make it harder to prosecute or sue police officers. Oregon in 2022 loosened the standard for when the police could use tear gas after tightening regulations just a year earlier.
The federal government, under the Trump administration, has also pulled back from holding law enforcement agencies accountable.
This week, the Justice Department said it would no longer investigate or oversee nearly two dozen police departments that were accused of civil rights violations, including in Minneapolis and Louisville, Ky. And in April, President Trump signed an executive order aimed at “unleashing” law enforcement, including by directing the U.S. attorney general to “provide legal resources” to defend police officers accused of wrongdoing.
Mr. Nix, the criminal justice professor in Nebraska, said the demands of constituents had changed in many places since the immediate aftermath of Mr. Floyd’s death.
“The climate is perceived as a little bit more friendly to policing,” he said. “Things that are perceived as unnecessarily tying the hands of police, you’re going to see those get rolled back.”
On the other hand, Mr. Nix said, many changes — including the use of body cameras, transparency measures and training on de-escalation — are focused on a broader range of goals than reducing police killings. Some, for example, train the police in better empathizing with those they encounter.
“In the aggregate, that spells better police-citizen interactions,” he said. But he said any significant reduction in the number of people killed by the police would require doing more than just focusing on department policies and involve a host of “societal factors that go way beyond the police.”
Mike Baker contributed reporting.
Steven Rich is a data reporter at The Times, using data analysis to investigate major issues and contextualize current events.
Tim Arango is a correspondent covering national news. He is based in Los Angeles.
Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs reports on national stories across the United States with a focus on criminal justice. He is from upstate New York.
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