Policing by
the Numbers
Download Policing by the Numbers
With over 2 million people behind bars, 9 million more ensnared in the criminal legal system, and 10 million arrests every year - the vast majority Black and other people of color - we have reached a crisis point.
Profiling
Officers stop Black drivers at higher rates than White drivers.
Officers ticket, search, and arrest Black and Latinx drivers more often than White drivers.
When searching Black and Latinx drivers, officers have less evidence than when searching White drivers and are less likely to find contraband.
Officers are almost three times more likely to search Black and Latinx drivers than White drivers.
Black people are four times more likely than White people to be arrested for marijuana.
According to a recent study, half of transgender people report feeling uncomfortable seeking police assistance. Approximately 6 percent of transgender people reported they experienced bias-based assault by an officer.
Use of Force
Officers killed 998 people in 2018.
Native Americans have the highest rates of fatal encounters with police, followed by Black people.
The overwhelming majority of people killed by officers in from 2015-2018 died by gunshot (95 percent). The remaining deaths occurred as a result of other uses of force(e.g., Tasers, physical force).
Black people are three times more likely to be killed by officers than White people; between 2010 and 2012, Black men aged 15-19 were 21 times more likely to be killed by officers than their White male counterparts.
Unarmed Black people (especially women) are more likely to be killed than unarmed people of other racial or ethnic backgrounds.
Roughly one-quarter (24 percent) of people killed by police in from 2015-2018 involved people with signs of unmet mental health needs.
Black people are 2.5 times more likely than White people and 1.7 times more likely than Latinx people to experience the threat or use of nonlethal force during an encounter with police officers.
Sexual Misconduct
A police officer is caught in an act of sexual misconduct about every five days.
Approximately 70 percent of misconduct cases involve people subject to traffic stops, crime victims and witnesses, or minors.
One-quarter of known survivors of police sexual misconduct were minors.
Accountability
As of 2015, all 50 states and the District of Columbia failed to comply with international standards of lethal force by law enforcement officers.
From 2006-2017, at least 1,881 police officers were fired from the nation’s 37 largest police departments – 451 of those officers successfully appealed and won their jobs back.
Grand juries rarely return indictments in officer-involved shooting cases. For example, in Dallas, of the 81 officer-involved shootings reviewed by a grand jury between 2008 and 2012, there was only one indictment.
From 2007-2017, the city of Minneapolis paid out nearly $21million (35 percent of the state total) for police misconduct allegations.
A U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) investigation of the Chicago Police Department found that the department sustained fewer than 2 percent of 30,000 misconduct complaints between 2010 and 2015.
The Baltimore Police Department sustained only 1 of 60 complaints of unlawful strip searches from 2012 to 2016.
The Philadelphia Police Department sustained 138 of 8,555 misconduct complaints between 2013 and 2016, however none of the officers were penalized.
Profiling 
Use of Force 
Police Discipline, Oversight, and Accountability 
