Fatal police shootings increase in U.S., but more go unreported: report

A police officer stands guard at the scene of a mass shooting in Highland Park, Illinois, the United States, July 4, 2022. (Photo by Vincent Johnson/Xinhua)

Fatal shootings by officers in at least 2,250 police and sheriffs' departments are missing from the past seven years of federal records.

NEW YORK, Dec. 6 (Xinhua) -- Fewer fatal police shootings are recorded by the U.S. federal government every year, despite renewed scrutiny of police use of force and millions of dollars spent to encourage local law enforcement to report the data, The Washington Post reported on Tuesday.

Even though federal records indicate that fatal shootings by police have been declining in the country since 2015, the newspaper's Fatal Force database shows the opposite is true: Officers have shot and killed more people every year, reaching a record high in 2021 with 1,047 deaths, said the report.

"The FBI database contains only about one third of the 7,000 fatal police shootings during this time -- down from half when The Post first started tracking," it noted.

Fatal shootings by officers in at least 2,250 police and sheriffs' departments are missing from the past seven years of federal records, according to an analysis of the database maintained by the newspaper, which began tracking the killings in 2015.

"The excluded data has created a misleading government picture of police use of force, complicating efforts at accountability," it said.

The incomplete data also obscures a racial discrepancy among those killed by police that is larger than the federal data suggests -- Black people are fatally shot by police far more often than is evident in the FBI data, at more than double the rate for White people, it added.