Report Shows Police Killings Rose in 2023

By Rosaland Tyler
Associate Editor
New Journal and Guide

More people were actually shot and killed by police officers in 2023 which increased the number of overall killings by 19 percent during an 11-year span, according to a new report titled, “Mapping Police Violence.”

More than 1,300 people in 2023 were killed by police, including a Black man in Memphis. In Virginia deputies fatally smothered a Black patient at a state mental hospital. Families of both of these victims received landmark legal settlements. The number of individuals killed by gunfire and number of officers killed in the line of duty declined, according to data from the Gun Violence Archives. However, there was an increase in the number of police officers shot.

“We’ve seen it stay similar or even creep up a little bit at times when crime was falling or at times when crime was increasing,” Justin Nix, a criminal justice professor at the University of Nebraska Omaha, said in a recent USA Today interview.

“We saw it persist throughout a global pandemic when people were staying home for several weeks, months,” Nix said.

”It appears to me then that the only way to get this number down significantly would be to make more significant changes to, you know, what policing means in this country.”

There were only 14 days without a police killing last year and on average, law enforcement officers killed someone every 6.6 hours, noted the report, which is primarily based on news reports and includes data from state and local government agencies.

Specifically, the increase climbed from 1,250 people in 2022, to 1,329 people in 2023.

The highest number of per capita shooting fatalities occurred in New Mexico, Alaska and West Virginia. About 42 percent of the incidents were captured on body-worn cameras, though the footage may not be publicly accessible. Blacks were nearly three times more likely than Whites to be killed by police.

Nix said, “When you ask human beings to go out and police a country awash with guns and train them and socialize them in their heads that a gun could be lurking around any corner, this is what you get.”