A main finding from the project is that there are significant persistent inequalities in fatal police shootings by race. In particular, Black and Latinx people are shot at disproportionately high rates relative to their population size. This finding is consistent in virtually all research on fatal police shootings, but this project affirms it using a much more comprehensive database of shootings relative to most other research.
The first plot below shows the rates of fatal police shootings by race:
The rate of fatal police shootings for African Americans is notably higher than all other groups. This also remains true over each year of data collection. You can download the source data of counts to replicate the analysis here.
Similar trends are true for police shootings of youth, defined as individuals aged between 10 and 24. The second plot is based on the rates of police shootings by race across different racial groups of youth:
As before, Black youth were disproportionately shot between 2014 and 2018.
The racial disparities in police shootings, both for adults and youth, are linked to several county-level factors. The two most consistently important are the underlying risks to law enforcement and patterns of racial segregation.