Police Use of Force Measures Work

Last weekend Al Jazeera mapped out Where black people are most disproportionately killed by police in the United States. The map revealed that Black Americans are two and half times more likely to be killed by a police officer than white Americans.

Of course that isn't the whole story. The Al Jazeera map used data from Mapping Police Violence. The 2019 Mapping Police Violence interactive map plots 1,099 people killed by the police across America last year. In other words in 2019 on average the U.S. police killed over three people every single day. In fact there were only 27 days in the whole of last year when a person wasn't killed at the hands of the police.

According to Mapping Police Violence black people are actually three times more likely to be killed at the hands of the police, even though black people are 1.3 times more likely to be unarmed than white people. Where people are killed by the police also has little to do with rates of violent crime across the USA. In Buffalo, which has a violent crime rate of 12 per 1000, 0 people were killed by the police from 2013-2016. In comparison in Orlando, with a violent crime rate of 9 per 1000, 13 people were killed by the police from 2013-2016.



According to the Police Use of Force Project there is a clear correlation between the levels of recorded police killings by individual police departments and the number of restrictive use of force policies these departments have. Police departments which have clear guidelines designed to de-escalate violent situations are less likely to kill people than police departments that don't have these use of violence policies.

These policies don't just protect the public from police violence - they also protect the police. Police working in police departments with more restrictive use of force policies are less likely to be assaulted on duty and less likely to be killed in the line of duty. More restrictive use of force policies also do not have a detrimental effect on crimes rates. According to the Police Use of Force Project departments with more restrictive use of force policies have similar crime rates as those with less restrictive policies.