CREATORS: Police Officer Involved Killings Show Modest Decline

Matthew T. Mangino
CREATORS
April 14, 2026

The Washington Post kept track of all police officer-involved shootings that resulted in death. The Post began collecting the data in 2015 because no one else was keeping track. According to a 2014 Wall Street Journal article, made part of the U.S. Senate official record, criminal justice experts lamented that there was no reliable national data on how many people are shot and killed by police officers each year.

Although national research groups were keeping data and statistics on topics ranging from how many people were victims of unprovoked shark attacks to the number of hogs and pigs living on farms in the United States, no one was keeping track of officer-involved shootings.

Then, of course, as The Post began massive newsroom layoffs, the police shootings data collection ended. Researchers can still utilize the data from 2015 to 2024. The data reveals that police in this country shoot and kill about 1,000 people a year. However, the data is limited to police involved shooting deaths, not all deaths at the hands of police.

Although officer-involved shootings are relatively rare in comparison with the millions of interactions between the police and the public, several high-profile fatal encounters with police —beginning with the 2014 killing of Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Mo., Beanna Tayler's 2020 killing in Louisville, Ky. and Goerge Floyds death by police in Minneapolis, Minn., in 2022, — piqued the interest of researchers and protesters alike.

Campaign Zero, a non-profit research institute, released an analysis of deaths caused by police in 2025, revealing the first decline in police killings in six years. Campaign Zero tracks all deaths by police, not just shooting deaths. Therefore, there is an inconsistency in the numbers. For instance, in 2024, Campaign Zero listed 1,365 killings and The Post listed 1,175. Campaign Zero recorded 1,329 killings in 2023 and The Post listed 1,169.

According to Campaign Zero, there were only six days in 2025 when law enforcement did not kill someone. On average, police killed 3.6 people per day — one person every 6.67 hours.

The data from Campaign Zero has some room for optimism. In 2025, police killed 1,314 people in the United States — a 5% decrease from 2024.

The stability in the annual number of homicides by police can be attributed to a statistical tool known as the probability theory. According to The Post's database, the probability theory holds that the quantity of rare events in huge populations tends to remain stable absent major societal changes, such as a fundamental shift in police culture or extreme restrictions on gun ownership.

The data also reveals an alarming trend. People with untreated mental illness are 16 times more likely to be killed during a police encounter than other people approached or stopped by law enforcement, according to a study released by the Treatment Advocacy Center.

Does that mean it is hopeless and no matter what we do, 1,000 people a year or more are going to die after an encounter with police? Not necessarily.

There are examples of changes in training or "use of force protocols" that have saved lives. In New York City in 1971, there were 314 officer-involved shootings, 93 of which were fatal. Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, told The Washington Post, "The following year the city passed a law prohibiting officers from shooting into vehicles."

Within two years, the city reduced police shootings to 121, with 41 fatal. By 2015, after a period when crime dropped precipitously, the number had fallen to 23 people shot by police with eight killed.

Officer-involved shootings can be reduced, and lives saved, with training and a change in the warrior culture of policing.

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book, "The Executioner's Toll," 2010, was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino

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PA faces daunting resentencing effort after Supreme Court ruling on LWOP

 Last month, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court gave lawmakers 120 days to find a legislative solution after ruling mandatory life sentences for second degree murder charges are unconstitutional under the state’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishments, reported the Pennsylvania Capital-Star.

The ruling is likely to kick off what could be the largest resentencing effort the commonwealth has ever undertaken, though the timeline will depend on decisions made by lawmakers.

In Pennsylvania, someone can be charged with second-degree murder even if prosecutors can’t prove they intended to cause another person’s death. In some cases, a person can be charged without actually killing someone. Prosecutors just need to prove someone died while the person charged committed a felony. That charge comes with a mandatory life sentence without parole, which the state’s high court ruled unconstitutional last month.

Last Thursday, lawmakers on the state House Judiciary Committee were set to vote on a bill that would have addressed the problem by making those serving such sentences eligible for parole after 25 years, and creating a 50-year maximum sentence for future second degree murder charges.

But as the panel’s meeting started, its chairman, Rep. Tim Briggs (D-Montgomery), announced he would be pulling the bill from consideration.

“These people have been serving long, unconstitutional sentences, and I will not put them in a worse position than what I believe the Supreme Court would order for them,” Briggs said about those currently serving life sentences without parole on second degree murder charges. “I am confident that as long as we all work together, we will come up with a bill we can all be proud of.”

Briggs said that he and other lawmakers on the committee were seeking input from people and organizations like public defenders, district attorneys and victims advocates.

But while some groups had issues with components of the proposal, the move rankled criminal justice advocates who have long sought to eliminate mandatory life sentences for those convicted of felony murder. 

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“Precrime" the claim that biometric technology can foretell crime

Sara Fathallah writes in the Inquest: In prisons and jails across the United States, authorities now use automated systems to transcribe phone calls and visitation videos and to flag words or phrases deemed risky. For decades, correctional facilities recorded and reviewed calls manually, but AI-driven systems now allow authorities to scan millions of minutes of conversations in real time.

In the 2010s, prisons began using a biometric technology called voiceprinting, which identifies individuals based on the unique characteristics of their voices. It allows correctional facilities to identify who is speaking on any given call and to search for other calls featuring the same voice. Texas-based Securus Technologies, one of the largest providers of prison phone services in the United States, supplies sophisticated voiceprinting services to hundreds of correctional agencies.

There is no scientific consensus on the validity of automatic speaker recognition, and experts recommend exercising extreme caution when using voice recognition as evidence in court. Even Securus’s 2016 patent acknowledges that “each given person’s vocal tract characteristics actually vary in a number of ways depending on time of day, how much the person has been talking that day and how loud, whether or not the person has a cold,” and other factors. But prisons continue to collect voiceprints and build growing databases; at least 200,000 voiceprints have been stored thus far. Sometimes, prisons pressure incarcerated people to give up their voice samples by threatening a complete loss of communications privileges to those who decline. In other instances, they enroll incarcerated people in voice recognition programs without their knowledge or consent. New York alone, for example, had already enrolled 92 percent of its incarcerated population by 2019.

In some jurisdictions, voiceprinting systems can be used to identify both incarcerated people and the individuals who speak to them. As representatives from the Electronic Frontier Foundation point out, such technologies can potentially be used to “profile anyone who has a voice that crosses into a prison, including all the parents, children, lovers, and friends of incarcerated people.” Advocates are afraid that authorities might flag individuals who are in touch with multiple incarcerated people, searching for patterns and ways to crack down on prison organizing.

Today, a growing array of wearable technologies—ankle monitors, bracelets that measure blood alcohol levels, smartphones themselves—are used to track people at nearly every stage of the criminal legal process.

A new generation of compulsory biometric devices, however, pushes far into dystopian territory, raising questions about how much biological information the carceral state feels entitled to collect. Some of these tools, already being tested in U.S. jails and prisons, take the form of rigid wristbands that monitor heart rate, skin temperature, cortisol levels, and so-called “activity” or stress indicators. According to the ACLU, they represent “not just a privacy invasion but an assault on inherent human dignity and autonomy.”

In some research initiates, the data gathered by biometric devices is already being analyzed and operationalized. In Indiana, a team of computer scientists and developers at Purdue University utilized such data in 2020 to train an AI algorithm to predict recidivism. According to the team’s press release, the project—funded by the Department of Justice and conducted in collaboration with county-level corrections and law enforcement agencies—harvested data such as stress and heart rates via wearable bracelets and smartphones. The stated goal was to determine which physiological indicators are linked to an individual’s “risk of returning to their criminal behavior.”

But as scholar Brian Jefferson notes in Digitize and Punish, algorithms used for carceral means are not “simply mathematical objects” but rather “artifacts of governance designed to achieve specific objectives.” By focusing on internal, physiological states rather than structural conditions—such as access to housing, employment, health care or social support—these models dismiss decades of work investigating recidivism and its social and economic causes. Those causes, as AI researchers Os Keyes and Chelsea Barabas have noted, are already well understood. What remains unsettled is why emerging technologies continue to search for answers inside the body, rather than in the systems that shape people’s lives.

Across these examples, a shared pattern emerges: the encoding of the body as evidence, often without the knowledge, consent, or recourse of those involved. This process strips people of their autonomy, dignity, and right against self-incrimination. Whether through DNA, eye movements, or physiological indicators of stress, these systems recast human bodies as sites of suspicion, deception, threat, or risk. Rather than eliminating human bias, they redistribute and reinforce it.

“Crime prediction algorithms,” Ruha Benjamin aptly explains, “should more accurately be called crime production algorithms.” Biometric tools are likely to expand further across the criminal legal system as police departments, courts, and prisons increasingly turn to A.I.-driven surveillance and predictive technologies. These tools are being deployed most aggressively in communities that are already heavily policed and disproportionately criminalized. Preparing for—and resisting—this expansion requires a broader understanding of biometrics beyond facial recognition alone, including the many ways bodily data can be collected and put to use. Fighting to ban facial recognition is not enough; it must be part of the larger fight to stop carceral biometrics and advance digital abolition.

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Five PA counties charged more than $21 million for immigration detention

Five county jails in Pennsylvania have or recently had agreements with federal immigration enforcement agencies to hold people in their jails, sometimes for months, in exchange for significant fees, Spotlight PA found, according to Spotlight PA.

Clinton, Erie, Franklin, and Pike Counties collectively charged more than $21 million for detention in 2024 and 2025, invoices obtained by Spotlight PA show. A fifth county, Cambria, has a similar detention arrangement, according to federal records and a county official — but denied Spotlight PA’s September 2025 request seeking payment information because ICE did not start sending detainees to its jail until later in the month.

Local government officials in favor of the agreements told Spotlight PA that the revenue generated supports services such as the county jail or general fund expenses.

“You’re always going to have pushback one way or another, but we haven’t really experienced it to this point,” Cambria County Commissioner Scott Hunt told Spotlight PA in early March. “This is a relationship that has gone back many years.

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ICE overstates its law enforcement support in Pennsylvania

In Pennsylvania, constables work alongside magistrate district judges, and have the power to arrest someone with an outstanding warrant, or to serve eviction or other civil papers. They can provide courtroom security or be called to keep order at a polling place, reported WESA and the Pennsylvania Capital-Star.

While none of those duties involve federal immigration enforcement, constables now make up more than one-quarter of the 287(g) signatories in Pennsylvania: Twenty of the 73 law enforcement agencies ICE claims to have enrolled in the state are constables. (The agency claims to have 1,500 partner agencies nationwide.)

Participants in 287(g) programs receive training and can gain access to federal grants and other assistance. But several constables from around the state contacted by WESA said that, they sought to engage with the program, only to be told their participation had been suspended.

Indeed, some critics of 287(g) programs say that constables should have no part in them at all, in part for the very reasons that led to confusion in Monroeville.

While constables have limited police powers and work closely with local courts, they are not part of any state or local police department. They act as independent contractors rather than court employees. They are elected locally, but have jurisdiction across the commonwealth.

And University of Pittsburgh law professor David Harris says a federal order for detention isn’t the kind of thing a constable can enforce.

“At the very least, it’s unclear that a constable would have any authority to make a move, an arrest, a detention of a person under one of those documents that comes from ICE,” he said.

Ari Shapell, a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, said he believes constables lack the authority under both federal and state law to enter into the agreements.

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THIEL COLLEGE--Comment No. 4

Why is the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Roper v. Simmons so important to juvenile criminal justice jurisprudence?  Explain in detail the decision's impact beyond the death penalty.

Meet one of the leading candidates to become the next Attorney General

Here is an introduction by The Bulwark to Senator Mike Lee of Utah, a short-lister for the position of United State Attorney General:

Public confidence in elections is a foundational requirement for a constitutional republic. Now, more than ever, we must have confidence and trust in Utah’s elections. . . .

The election systems we built here in Utah work well because of a core tenant [sic] of the U.S. Constitution: federalism. When appropriately applied, the division of power between the federal and state governments means decisions that directly impact us are made by people closest to us in state and local government.

United States Senator Mike Lee coauthored the above for Deseret News on October 5, 2022.

Stephen Richer writes, I agree wholeheartedly with the senator’s argument: Utah has reasonable election laws and competent election officials, and the public can trust its election results. Mass interference in Utah’s vote is indeed “virtually impossible,” as Lee put it a bit lower in the piece. And if you don’t like the results of a particular election, you can always work harder to win the next one.

But Lee is now making somewhat different arguments than he did in 2022. He regularly posts that non-citizens will steal our elections if we don’t require voters to provide documented proof of citizenship—something Utah didn’t require for Lee’s 2010, 2016, or 2022 elections.1 He also now says that secure elections require photo identification—but the vast majority of Utah ballots are verified by signature matching, not photo ID. He tells us to be suspicious of mail ballots. But Utah is an all-mail state. And he is suspicious of states that don’t finish counting ballots within forty-eight hours of Election Day—a deadline that Utah failed to hit in 2024.

There’s nothing novel about a flip-flopping politician. Lee is already famous for making a habit of turnabout, including on Trump’s morals (“If anyone spoke to my wife, or my daughter, or my mother, or any of my five sisters the way Mr. Trump has spoken to women, I wouldn’t hire that person”), Trump’s lies (“We can get into the fact that he accused my best friend’s father of conspiring to kill JFK”), and Trump’s disregard for basic law (“I’d like some assurances that he is going to be a vigorous defender for the U.S. Constitution”).

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