About the FPS Project

This website is a companion to Patrick Rafail’s (Sociology, Tulane University) Fatal Police Shootings (FPS) research project. For now, the project focuses on the period between 2014 and 2018, with the goal of developing a free, accessible database of fatal police shootings that meets stringent standards of rigor.

The FPS Project combines multiple sources of data, including the Fatal Encounters Project (http://www.fatalencounters.org/), the Washington Post’s Fatal Police Shootings database (https://github.com/washingtonpost/data-police-shootings), the Guardian’s The Counted project (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/series/counted-us-police-killings), and the now abandoned United States Police-Shooting Database (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1cEGQ3eAFKpFBVq1k2mZIy5mBPxC6nBTJHzuSWtZQSVw/edit#gid=1842418396). Cases were cross-referenced using a combination of fuzzy matching, dates, and locations. Next, the data were compared to a customized machine learning model that uses Google Search results to identify any other missing cases. When combined, this provides among the most comprehensive enumerations of fatal police shootings over the project’s analysis period.

The FPS project is ongoing. At present, Rafail is building an AI system to partially help identify and code cases of FPS through the present. As results and data become available, the information will be posted on this website.

This work has been supported (in part) by Grant # 1902-11743 from the Russell Sage Foundation. Any opinions expressed are those of the principal investigator(s)/Administrator of the Tulane Education Fund AKA Tulane University alone and should not be construed as representing the opinions of the Foundation. This study was also partially funded by a Carol Lavin Bernick Faculty Grant from Tulane University.