As crime falls, police violence rises. And America still struggles to track it.

Former Louisville police officer Brett Hankison was sentenced to 33 months in prison in July 2025 for violating the civil rights of Breonna Taylor, a Black woman he shot and killed after officers executed a no-knock warrant at her home. Two months after Taylor was killed, George Floyd, an unarmed Black man accused of trying to pass off a counterfeit $20 bill, died under the knee of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin.

Together, their 2020 deaths served as the opening salvo of a global protest movement that called for greater racial justice, law enforcement accountability and an end to fatal police encounters.

Half a decade later, however, the few organizations that attempt to compile police violence statistics suggest things haven’t improved much. 

The complexity of tracking police data

While there are no national standards for reporting police misconduct, two organizations –– Mapping Police Violence and The Washington Post –– have tracked the numbers. According to both, 2024 was the deadliest year on record for encounters between law enforcement and civilians.

Mapping Police Violence reported 1,376 people were killed by police in 2024, compared to 1,358 in 2023. Meanwhile, The Washington Post, which ended its tracking project last year, recorded 1,175 incidents in 2024, versus 1,164 in 2023. These numbers tend to increase as new information emerges. 

Both Mapping Police Violence and the Post compile their reports using open-source data, including social media posts, obituaries, criminal records databases and police reports. As such, they aren’t verified by any law enforcement entity and are “limited in their validity,” a spokesperson for the National Policing Institute (NPI) told Straight Arrow News. 

“On the other hand,” the spokesperson added, “federally collected data, such as the FBI National [Use-of-Force] database, is limited by underreporting from law enforcement agencies due to the voluntary nature of the reporting.”

The FBI’s Crime Data Explorer — which relies on voluntary participation from law enforcement agencies — reported 33 deaths due to law enforcement use of force in 2024, compared with 32 in 2023.

Analyzing criminal justice data is “complicated,” said Ernesto Lopez, a senior research specialist at the nonpartisan Council on Criminal Justice.

“The number of agencies that report at least one [use-of-force] incident per month tends to be less than 150 agencies out of over 19,000 law enforcement agencies,” Lopez told SAN. 

However, that could just be because many agencies have nothing to report. 

“You can have a small law enforcement agency, police department, that serves 5,000 people, and they don’t have any use-of-force issues,” Lopez said. “But I think with that, the fact that about 150 agencies report at least one incident a month is surely an undercount.”

The FBI revised its method for collecting crime statistics from local law enforcement agencies in 2021, further complicating analysis. As a result, several large cities, including New York City and Los Angeles, temporarily stopped reporting their metrics to the federal level.

Are fatal police encounters tied to crime or victimization?

America saw some of its lowest overall crime rates in more than half a century in 2024, according to the FBI’s annual crime report. Violent crime was down 4.5% compared with 2023, as property crime and hate crime fell by 8.1% and 1.5%, respectively. 

Roughly 96% of agencies nationwide voluntarily reported their data, an increase of 2.1% over the previous year. The report also notes that, as of 2024, every city agency serving a population of more than 1 million residents contributed a full year’s worth of data –– including Los Angeles, which had returned to the fold. 

Victimization rates, the rates that indicate how frequently a person or household experienced specific types of crimes, also declined between 1993 and 2023, though the FBI estimates a smaller percentage of robbery victimizations in 2023, compared to 2022, were reported to police.

“Findings show that there was an overall decline in the rate of violent victimization over the last three decades, from 1993 to 2023,” Dr. Kevin M. Scott, acting director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, said in a 2024 report. “While the 2023 rate was higher than those in 2020 and 2021, it was not statistically different from the rate 5 years ago, in 2019.”

Despite crime and victimization rates continuously dropping, fatal police encounters continue to rise. However, Lauren Bonds, executive director at the National Police Accountability Project (NPAP), said drawing the parallel is not that simple.

“I think about 4% of police time, if we’re looking at local law enforcement agencies, is focused on addressing violent crime, investigating reported violent crimes, or looking to apprehend people who have committed violent crimes,” Bonds told SAN.

Many high-profile killings –– from Tyre Nichols and Daunte Wright to Anthony Baez –– are not the result of officers responding to a violent crime in progress. Rather, they typically begin with nonviolent infractions.

“You might expect there to be a correlation between violent crime and police violence, but that’s not what police spend most of their time doing, and so that’s not usually what precipitates a violent encounter between the police and the public,” Bonds said.

De-escalation training

In 2022, Congress passed the Law Enforcement De-escalation Training Act, ordering the Department of Justice (DOJ) to develop a de-escalation program for police. At that time, as many as 50% of fatal police encounters involved a person experiencing a mental health crisis, according to the bill’s authors. 

But there were no standardized guidelines for helping officers interact with people with mental health issues.

Now, the National Policing Institute is collaborating with the DOJ on a program that agencies across the U.S. can use to reduce fatal encounters.

“Law enforcement officers wear many hats and are on the front lines of the mental health and substance abuse crises in America,” Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, one of the bill’s co-sponsors, said in a 2022 statement. “Now that this bill is signed into law, we can make our communities safer by providing critical training for law enforcement officers.”

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Between May 2024 and April 2025, violent crime was down 6.6%, while property crime fell 11.2%, according to the FBI.

According to the National Policing Institute, de-escalation training is an “essential tool to help officers respond effectively, build trust and minimize the use of force during interactions.”

Reimagining de-escalation, crisis intervention and use-of-force training is nothing new. A decade ago, the Police Executive Research Forum published a paper on police use of force. In it, departments revealed that the average agency spends roughly eight hours on crisis intervention training.

“Officers are trained in officer survival,” Thaddeus Johnson, a former Tennessee law enforcement officer, told SAN. “You’re pretty much trained that you’re going out to fight against a foreign adversary, not going to police your community. So that fear is stoked, even from training.”

While there is no federal standard for law enforcement training, various agencies work with departments. The Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, or FLETC, is a division of the Department of Homeland Security that trains and supports agencies across the country.  

The FLETC declined an interview with SAN, instead issuing a statement that said its trainings are regularly updated according to best practices and input from subject matter experts.

“Trainees engage in practical scenarios and hands-on exercises, honing their physical and tactical skills, and receive comprehensive legal and ethical training,” according to the statement.

Reducing the number of fatal police encounters

Some criminal justice advocates argue that better training can help stem the rise in police violence. But a lack of standardized federal reporting or tracking of police misconduct makes larger reforms tougher to implement.

“It can be incredibly difficult to get any kind of reforms passed when we’re still disputing whether there’s a problem,” Bonds told SAN. “Stats really matter, data really matters to elected officials, and if they don’t have those kinds of statistics that a database would yield, it’s very easy for it to be dismissed, and just for it not to be a priority.”

A dearth of data makes it hard to track other issues as well. 

“The lack of a national database, particularly one that tracks individual officers’ misconduct, really allows for the wandering police officer phenomenon,” Bonds told SAN. 

A national database was a provision in the 2021 George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which passed the House but stalled in the Senate.

“I think some of the critiques, or some of the opposition that we heard for the proposal, shines a little bit of a light on why it hasn’t happened yet. You know, officer privacy, burden on individual police departments to kind of do reporting to the national agency, the cost,” said Bonds, who believes there is still bipartisan support for such a database.

The National Policing Institute released a guide in April 2024 outlining how agencies should summarize use-of-force data for the public. That guidebook calls for a digital use-of-force dashboard, clear definitions of use of force, describing use-of-force training, presenting and analyzing demographic data, auditing body-worn camera footage and detailing internal investigations.

Destigmatizing the relationship between police and their communities

For the past few years, national justice reform incubator New Blue has worked with local law enforcement agencies, soliciting proposals on how to improve relations between police and their communities. “Compassionate policing” has popped up as a recurring theme in those proposals, and law enforcement at large right now, according to New Blue Executive Director Kristin Daley. 

“Compassionate policing is important because we have to acknowledge that a lot of times police are interacting with a person on what could be the very worst day of their life,” Daley told SAN.

Compassion is a two-way street, Daley said. It’s equally important for the community to recognize the stress that many officers are under.

“I often hear law enforcement speak about, you know, ‘We’re not trained social workers or therapists,’” Daley said. “We are expecting police to have all of these skill sets that have not necessarily always been prioritized in their training.”

At the same time, there is a power dynamic at play. 

“It is kind of on law enforcement to take the first step to make themselves open and available to those discussions with the community,” Daley said. “But we certainly want to encourage both sides to come together and collaborate on what the future of public safety looks like.”

To date, New Blue has facilitated three cohorts, one of which included both officers and community members. By the time the organization wraps its fourth cohort, it will have worked with more than 80 people, including law enforcement and civilians. 

“This is a service that we can certainly adjust with contributions from community members so that things are not an ‘us-versus-them,’” Daley said. “We really want to break out of that us-versus-them mentality and come to a shared vision for the future.”

During New Blue engagement sessions, Daley said she looked on as participants realized law enforcement and community members were after the same thing: “safe, healthy communities, less violence [and] more positive interaction.” 

Daley remembered one community participant who, according to Daley’s recollection, said the New Blue session “opened my eyes to the fact that we were really seeing a lot of things in the same exact way, and having the same exact goals. And it made me feel more open to having a continued discussion with the police in my community and seeing what we can do to get on the same page and support each other.”

The feedback stayed with her.

“That was incredibly impactful for us to hear,” Daley told SAN. “It wasn’t something that we necessarily expected to come out of that exercise, but it really zeroed in on the fact that we’re, in many ways, pushing this us-versus-them picture of things when, if you can get people in the same room and relate to each other as human beings, and set up the environment for positive, respectful communication, we’re not butting heads as much as you would think.”

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Ella Rae Greene, Editor In Chief