Fatal police shootings in 2021 set record since The Post began tracking, despite public outcry
Police shot and killed at least 1,055 people nationwide last year, the highest total since The Washington Post began tracking fatal shootings by officers in 2015 — underscoring the difficulty of reducing such incidents despite sustained public attention to the issue.
The new count is up from 1,021 shootings the previous year and 999 in 2019. The total comes amid a nationwide spike in violent crime — although nowhere near historic highs — and as people increasingly are venturing into public spaces now that coronavirus vaccines are widely available.
Despite setting a record, experts said the 2021 total was within expected bounds. Police have fatally shot roughly 1,000 people in each of the past seven years, ranging from 958 in 2016 to last year’s high. Mathematicians say this stability may be explained by Poisson’s random variable, a principle of probability theory that holds that the number of independent, uncommon events in a large population will remain fairly stagnant absent major societal changes.
That the number of fatal police shootings last year is within 60 of the average suggests officers’ behavior has not shifted significantly since The Post began collecting data, said Andrew Wheeler, a private-sector criminologist and data scientist.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2022/02/09/fatal-police-shootings-record-2021/
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