2024 by the numbers

important but not surprising

My general belief that the police are not the problem is based purely off of research and reality.

So, let’s see what happened in 2024 - By The Numbers.

(Data from the Fatal Force Project - by WAPO).

Photo by Sean Lee on Unsplash

The Numbers

Arrests

There are approximately 54 million yearly police-citizen contacts.

Law enforcement in the U.S. makes somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 million arrests every year.

• This is an important number to keep in mind to contextualize all other data sets.

Fatal Police Shootings

• 1133 people were fatally shot by police officers in 2024.

• 1068 of those fatally shot by police were men (94.2%).

• 237 of those fatally shot by police were black men (20.9%).

• 350 of those fatally shot by police were white men (30.8%).

• 788 of those fatally shot by police were under the age of 45 (69.5%).

• 984 of those fatally shot by police were armed with a gun (86.8%).

Takeaways

The data on fatal police shootings for 2024 is not surprising. This is typical of every other year. That is - fatal police shootings generally involve young men who threaten police officers with a gun.

The insane notion that police officers are engaging in wild shootouts with acorns on a daily basis is simply not based in reality.

Photo by LOGAN WEAVER | @LGNWVR on Unsplash

The Myth

There is a myth that police officers murder scores of unarmed black men each year.

A survey produced by Skeptic.com revealed that people who identify as “liberal” or “very liberal” believed that 1,000 or more unarmed black men were murdered by police in 2019.

This lie has incited violent riots and divided society - so it is important to look at the data.

In 2024 - 9 unarmed black men were fatally shot by police.

Here is a closer at these unarmed victims.

• In 4 cases the suspect attempted to/was successful in disarming the officer.

• In 1 case the suspect attacked the officer with a knife

• In 2 cases the suspect was actively attacking the officer with bare hands.

• 1 case was an objectively unreasonable OIS and the officer is facing voluntary manslaughter charges.¹

It’s interesting that nearly half of the instances of police officers killing “unarmed” black men - the suspect was trying to/did disarm the police officer prior to the shooting.

If only data could destroy the ugly myth that police officers are hunting and unnecessarily murdering black men.

Final Thoughts

The one missing data set that is not available from WAPO is: resisting arrest.

What percentage of fatal police shootings are proceeded by a suspect resisting arrest? I am guessing a healthy percentage. Therefore, if this illegal behavior ceased - the number of fatal police shootings would decrease.

And, that is the point. That is the goal. All of the articles, posts, videos, and debates are to achieve one goal - to lower the violence between citizens and police.

This is something I have in common with some SWJ activists. We likely have diagnosed the same problem, but disagree on the solution.

• They want police officers to stop proactively policing and protecting.

• I want suspects to stop resisting arrest and attacking police officers.

It should be impossible to argue with the objective data and reach the logical conclusion - the police are not the problem.

1. William Dwayne Rankin. We covered this case when it occurred.