Police-associated deaths and police brutality are becoming increasingly reported as a public health issue, helped by the fact that the American Public Health Association has an official policy statement on the issue. It therefore helps to know where to find data on these incidents. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to find all the information a journalist might want in a convenient single place, and it’s often necessary to cobble together different statistics or data sets. If just diving into this issue for the first time, a helpful primer at Journalist’s Resource can give you the big picture along with many resources to check out. They offer a wealth of resources and data on deaths that occur in police custody in the U.S.
One study that provides a nice overview of using health care administrative datasets to track injuries resulting from police interaction, both justified and unjustified, is “Perils of police action: a cautionary tale from US data sets,” in BMJ, though it’s unfortunately behind a paywall. The data resources below include both “official” sources, such as federal agencies, as well as media-based, nonprofit or informal collections of information, so it will require a bit of picking through to find precisely what is needed for a particular story or project.
The Bureau of Justice Statistics Use of Force is an official federal resource that regularly publishes reports that include Police–Public Contact Surveys every three years and data from the Arrest-Related Deaths program. It also includes annual data in the FBI’s Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted.
Reports on specific cities, such as Los Angeles (Harvard, May 2009) and Baltimore(federal/DOJ, August 2016), are available from the agencies or departments that conducted the report.
Interestingly, some of the better data comes from news sources. The Guardian’s investigation “The Counted,” as they state it, “revealed the true number of people killed by law enforcement” and related trends, actually leading to a response from the U.S. government. The Washington Post similarly maintains a database called Fatal Force, which annually compiles data on people shot and killed by police, provides their methodology and allows anyone to download the data. Fatal Encounters is a website run by a single journalist in Reno, Nev., who attempts to track all deaths caused by law enforcement.
The Cato Institute offers a daily newsfeed recap of police misconduct reported in the media across the U.S. and provides quarterly, semi-annually and annual statistical reports and various ancillary reports.
Finally, Mapping Police Violence does exactly what it sounds like and contains several graphs and charts of police violence with an option to download the source data.