It’s now been more than a decade since the death of Michael Brown, and half a decade since the death of George Floyd, two incidents that thrust police officers’ use of force into the national spotlight, led to protests and riots, and reinvigorated long-standing debates about whether police are biased against black people.
And yet, still in 2025, those trying to learn the truth about race and policing are hampered by a lack of data. In our high-tech and civil-liberties-conscious country, one imagines there would be comprehensive public information on police shootings, at minimum containing the who, what, where, when, and why of each case. In reality, federal efforts to track these incidents are spotty at best and improving only slowly, and it’s fallen to private projects such as the Washington Post’s “Fatal Encounters” to collect better numbers, relying largely on news reports. Incidentally, “Fatal Encounters” includes only fatal shootings, as the name implies, and the paper discontinued it this year.
Continue reading the entire piece here at the Washington Examiner (paywall)
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Robert VerBruggen is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Follow him on Twitter here.
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