U.S. Homicides by Police: The Grim Numbers

The problem is very bad. But if we dig a bit deeper, there may be a way to change things.

With homicides at the hands of the police once again dominating the news, it’s a good time to reexamine exactly how bad a problem we have in the United States. One way to do that is to explore the rates of homicides by police in other Western industrialized countries (per million residents) versus those we have in America. 

A multi-country analysis shows we indeed have a very big problem. This chart, published by the Prison Policy Initiative (PPI) using data between 2017 and 2019, shows that the rate of homicides by police is over three times that of our neighbor Canada, and four times that of Australia. Even more astoundingly, it is sixty-six times that of England and one hundred sixty-seven times that of Japan:

Rates of homicides by police are sometimes difficult to absorb because they aren’t translated into real numbers very readily, so the PPI also published actual numbers with a chart that shows the difference all too starkly. Using data from the same countries, the annual number of homicides by police in America in 2019 was a whopping 1,099 but only three in England. Within Canada, using figures from 2017, the number was 36 and for Australia it was 21:

In an earlier piece, I explored how most homicides by police began with a non-violent incident (58 percent, according to Mapping Police Violence). And yet, in the United States each year, there are over 4.9 million people arrested, but only five percent of those arrests are for actual serious, violent offenses. The vast majority of arrests are for misdemeanor charges, including such benign offenses as sitting on a sidewalk or jaywalking. The propensity of America to overpolice, particularly within communities of color, leads inevitably to confrontations that statistically are known to escalate and lead to homicides.

There is a movement to “defund” the police, which due to its unfortunate naming has morphed into a scary talking point used by the right. But putting aside what we call it, we need to begin to move away from overpolicing—that is, using armed police officers to control so much of society’s perceived but readily addressable problems, from drug use to loitering.

Combined with an already heavily armed society (the mere perception of which can cause non-violent situations to turn deadly quickly), and on top of inherent racial biases, lack of adequate training for officers, and understandable lack of trust of police within whole communities of color, the cycle of police homicides will continue unless we make fundamental changes. To break this cycle, we need to reduce the instances of police interaction on non-violent offenses, everything from pretextual traffic stops to mental health crises to non-violent domestic disputes.

In short, when we feel frustrated at the number and frequency of police homicides making headlines and devastating families and communities in the United States, the answer isn’t only to cry racism and condemn police brutality, though those are certainly basic and horrific contributing factors. We must also demand a wholesale scale down for policing of non-violent offenses, traffic stops without serious cause, abusive stop-and-frisk policies, the so-called “war” on drugs, and other interactions that do nothing to improve the sense of safety and trust in our communities while inexorably leading to confrontation and tragic loss of over a thousand lives a year.