Tag: Statistics

Data Shows Significant Decline in Police Violence in California – Davis Vanguard

Note: There is no exact definition for Police Violence. Many times Police Violence is defined as any force used by the police. This is a poor and misleading definition. At the end of the article the point is made that “Red States” are driving increases of police violence. This can be because of legitimate uses of police use of force.

California law enforcement officers killed fewer people, fired fewer shots, and used force less often in 2024 than in any year since the state began tracking the data, according to an analysis by the San Francisco Chronicle, while red states such as Texas and Florida saw an increase in police killings.
— Read on davisvanguard.org/2025/08/california-officer-involved-shootings/

Research: Police uses of lethal force dropped dramatically in US from 2021-23 – News Bureau

The number of police-involved lethal force incidents in the U.S. dropped 24% from 2021 to 2023, according to research from the Cline Center for Advanced Social Research at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

The Cline Center’s SPOTLITE project has compiled nearly a decade’s worth of data to track and identify police uses of lethal force across the U.S.
— Read on news.illinois.edu/research-police-uses-of-lethal-force-dropped-dramatically-in-us-from-2021-23/

Police stops and naïve denominators | Crime Science

A comparison of the racial composition of police stops to the entire population of a city or jurisdiction is frequently cited as evidence of racial bias in proactive policework. This article argues that using base population is naïve to the realities of the distribution of crime and policing. Using the example of Philadelphia, PA (USA), the impact of different benchmarks to estimate racial disparity in stop data is demonstrated. The range of alterative benchmarks include the spatial distribution of calls for service, the locations of violent crimes, and the demographic composition of suspects in crime as reported by the public. The article concludes by arguing that if cities ask police departments to prioritize certain problems and places, benchmarks to which police are held accountable should better reflect those priorities.
— Read on link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s40163-025-00252-y

Trends in Gun Theft – Council on Criminal Justice

Hundreds of thousands of crimes involving firearms occur each year in the United States. In 2022, for example, guns were used in more than three quarters of murders, one third of robberies, and a quarter of aggravated assaults.1 But less is known about how people who use guns in violence acquire their weapons.

One source of guns used in crimes is theft.2 While research on the role of gun theft in gun crime is limited,3 a small but growing body of evidence suggests that stolen guns may play a significant role in violent crime. Stolen guns are more likely than other guns to be recovered in crimes,4 and gun crime appears to increase in neighborhoods from which guns have been recently stolen.5 Despite the potential importance of stolen guns as a source of guns used in crime, data on gun theft trends are limited
— Read on counciloncj.org/trends-in-gun-theft/

Discipline for police misconduct on the rise in New Jersey, data shows • New Jersey Monitor

Nearly 550 officers in New Jersey were fired, demoted, or suspended for more than five days in 2024 for misconduct, up from 460 cops in 2023.
— Read on newjerseymonitor.com/2025/07/07/discipline-for-police-misconduct-on-the-rise-in-new-jersey-data-shows/

See the NJ Attorney General’s website on police discipline