Reporting on police violence isn’t as straightforward as it is with community violence.
One complication is that police departments generally don’t report crimes committed by their own officers. Departments also often don’t include officer-involved shootings in the city’s overall shooting statistics, and only some cities have independent oversight agencies that investigate misconduct and release their findings to the public.
Independent researchers and data gatherers are key to plugging those gaps, such as Mapping Police Violence.
Mapping Police Violence is a live tracker of violent acts perpetrated by law enforcement created and managed by Campaign Zero, a nonprofit advocating for stronger police accountability and alternative methods for policing.
The tracker touts itself as the “most comprehensive accounting of people killed by police since 2013” and exists to help fill gaps in government databases that track police violence, such as the CDC’s National Vital Statistics System.
The tracker’s dashboard covers a range of stats such as the total number of people in the United States killed by police so far this year, the states where those killings occurred, whether the officer used a firearm, the victims’ demographics and how 2026’s year-to-date total compares to previous years. It also includes maps that zoom in on neighborhood-level violence in certain cities, like Chicago and St. Louis.
The dashboard lets users break the data down by state, race of the victim and year (going back to 2013). The database is also easy to export to run your own analysis.
The tracker defines police violence as: “Any incident where a law enforcement officer (off-duty or on-duty) applies force resulting in the death of another person, whether it is considered ‘justified’ or ‘unjustified’ by the U.S. criminal legal system.”
The tracker compiles data from several sources, mainly local and state government agencies and media.
Story examples
This dataset can be used to tell both national and local stories about police violence.
For example, The Guardian US used Mapping Police Violence data for this 2022 story that found police killed nearly 600 people during traffic stops in a five-year period. They also determined that people of color were disproportionately targeted during those traffic stops.
At the local level, the Boston Globe published a story in April that used Mapping Police Violence to find that New Hampshire police killed three people in just one month earlier this year.
Using the dataset, the Globe reporter determined that the state recorded as many fatal police encounters in the first third of 2026 as in all of 2025.
