A look at the data - Officer Involved Shootings

With the recent national news headlines concerning officer involved shootings, I decided to look at the actual data as provided by the Center for Disease Controls mortality statistics. Using their database and classification system I looked at the data from the years 1999 to 2014. The classification system is know as ICD-10. Within the ICD database. Officer Involved Fatalities (OIF) are referred to as legal interventions and include legal executions.


Given the sensitivity to racial demographics I looked at total data and that for African Americans over the 16 year period.

Here is a link to the data.

In the last 16 years the average fatalities for officer involved shootings in the United states were 360 per year. For African Americans that number was just over 94. Given that the African American population in the US is about 12% of the total we would expect about 41 fatalities per year. The actual number is over 200% of what we would expect, all things being equal.

The ICD based statistics also give numbers for legal executions. On average the execution rate in the US is about 51 per year, which includes about 17 for African Americans. Since we would expect just over 6 executions per year the rate for African Americans is about 280% more than what we would expect.


For further reference:

Trends in Mortality Due to Legal Intervention in the United States, 1979 Through 1997