Police Brutality in the United States: Scale, Accountability, and Reform

Police brutality in the United States — the use of excessive, unreasonable, or unlawful force by law enforcement officers against civilians — kills more than a thousand people a year, falls heaviest on Black, Native, and Pacific Islander communities, and almost never ends in criminal charges against the officers involved. In 2025, for the first time in six years, the annual death toll dropped. Local reforms are spreading. Federal oversight is being dismantled at the same time.

How Often It Happens

Law enforcement in the United States killed at least 1,383 people in 2024, the highest figure recorded since the research group Campaign Zero began tracking it. In 2025 that number fell to at least 1,314, a 5% decline and the first year-over-year drop since 2019.¹ That still works out to an average of 3.6 killings per day, with only six days in the entire year passing without one.² By mid-June 2026, police had killed at least 552 people.³

The U.S. rate of fatal police violence runs at 3.4 per million people. Canada’s rate is 0.9, Australia’s is 0.7, and France’s is 0.29.⁴ Finland and Norway have gone years with no police killings at all. Training is one commonly cited factor. American recruits spend about 21 weeks in the academy; comparable European programs can run more than three years. U.S. academies average 71 hours on firearm skills and 21 hours on de-escalation and crisis intervention.⁵

Who Is Most Affected

Racial disparities persist across every group tracked, even as the overall count fell in 2025. Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander people were 5.5 times more likely to be killed by police than white people. American Indian and Alaska Native people were 3 times more likely, Black people 2.6 times more likely, and Hispanic people 1.3 times more likely.⁶ Black people accounted for more than 23% of those killed by police firearms in 2025 while making up roughly 13% of the population.⁷ The Sentencing Project has estimated that at current rates, police will kill one in every 1,000 Black men over the course of their lifetimes.⁸

Non-fatal encounters show the same pattern. Officers are more than 2.5 times as likely to use or threaten force against Black individuals as against white ones. During traffic stops, police search Black drivers 1.7 times as often and Latino drivers 2.6 times as often as white drivers, and are less likely to find contraband on Black and Latino drivers than on white ones.⁸

Mental health crises are another throughline. About 20% of people killed by police in 2025 showed signs of mental or behavioral health issues, and 89% of those killings came after someone in the community called 911 for help.⁶

Why Officers Rarely Face Charges

Criminal charges after a fatal police encounter remain rare. About 4% of officers who killed someone in 2025 were charged with a crime, up from roughly 2% in 2019. The rate has doubled, and it is still 4%.⁶ Three structural barriers do most of the work.

Qualified Immunity

Qualified immunity is a judge-made doctrine that shields government officials, including police, from civil lawsuits unless the specific right they violated was “clearly established” by earlier case law. It is not written into the Constitution or into Section 1983, the federal civil rights statute it effectively limits.⁹ The Supreme Court has shown no interest in revisiting it. In March 2026, the Court issued an unsigned opinion in Zorn v. Linton reversing a lower court’s denial of qualified immunity to a Vermont detective who had used a rear-wristlock on a passively resisting protester. Three dissenting justices described the ruling as part of a “one-sided approach to qualified immunity” that functions as “an absolute shield for law enforcement officers.”¹⁰

Federal bills to abolish qualified immunity have stalled. A handful of states moved on their own. Colorado authorized damage actions against officers and explicitly barred qualified immunity as a defense. New Mexico created a state cause of action for constitutional violations with no qualified immunity. New York City amended its administrative code to bar officers from asserting the defense for certain violations. Other states moved the opposite direction. Iowa broadened the defense in 2021, and Connecticut sanctioned a “good faith” belief defense for officers facing state constitutional claims.⁹

Police Union Contracts

A study of 178 contracts from many of the country’s largest departments identified provisions that limit officer interrogations after alleged misconduct, mandate the destruction of disciplinary records, ban civilian oversight, prohibit anonymous civilian complaints, and indemnify officers in civil lawsuits.¹¹ More than 70% of collective bargaining agreements allow officers sanctioned for misconduct to appeal through arbitration, a process that can override decisions by police leadership and civilian review boards. In Philadelphia, officers have successfully appealed sanctions at least two-thirds of the time. “Purge clauses” in many contracts require departments to destroy disciplinary records after two to five years, making it harder to spot patterns.¹²

Officers Who Keep Getting Rehired

Officers fired for misconduct often find work at another agency. Research from Florida found that in any given year, about 1,100 previously fired officers, roughly 3% of the state’s police workforce, were employed at other agencies. They tend to end up at smaller departments with fewer resources in areas with larger communities of color, and they are statistically more likely to be fired again or receive misconduct complaints.¹³ In Texas, about 25% of fired officers were rehired by other agencies between 2015 and 2019.¹⁴

The National Decertification Index, operated by IADLEST since 1999, records when a state agency revokes an officer’s certification but does not share details of the underlying misconduct, and state participation is voluntary.¹⁵ California granted its POST commission decertification authority in 2021. Massachusetts established a new POST commission with the power to revoke licenses. Iowa barred officers fired for misconduct from being rehired anywhere in the state.¹⁴

What Cities Pay

Civil liability has become a major municipal expense. New York City paid approximately $796 million to settle police misconduct lawsuits between 2019 and 2025. In 2025 alone, the city settled 1,044 cases for more than $117 million, with roughly $42 million tied to wrongful conviction settlements and $28 million involving incidents that occurred more than 20 years earlier.¹⁶ Nationally, the Police Funding Database Project has tracked more than 400 publicly reported settlements combining monetary compensation and policy changes, totaling over $3.96 billion as of late 2025.¹⁷

Cases That Moved the Law

A few incidents reshaped the legal and political terrain around police violence.

Rodney King and the 1992 Los Angeles Riots

On March 3, 1991, a bystander recorded LAPD officers striking Rodney King with batons and kicking him roughly 30 times after a vehicle chase. King suffered a broken ankle, a broken facial bone, and multiple lacerations. Four officers were charged with assault and excessive force; on April 29, 1992, a Simi Valley jury acquitted all four. Six days of rioting followed in Los Angeles, killing more than 60 people, injuring over 2,300, producing 7,000 acts of arson, and causing financial losses approaching $1 billion.¹⁸

Federal prosecutors then charged the officers with civil rights violations. Two, Stacy Koon and Laurence Powell, were found guilty of using unreasonable force and sentenced to 30 months. King received $3.8 million in a civil settlement. The Christopher Commission produced sweeping recommendations on recruitment, discipline, and civilian complaints.¹⁸ In 1994, Congress authorized the Attorney General to conduct “pattern or practice” investigations of police departments, a power that remains central to federal oversight.¹⁹

Michael Brown and Ferguson

On August 9, 2014, Ferguson, Missouri, officer Darren Wilson shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown. Weeks of protests followed, and the Black Lives Matter movement entered the national mainstream. The Department of Justice opened a federal civil rights investigation and ultimately concluded the evidence did not support prosecuting Wilson, finding that physical and forensic evidence corroborated his account of a struggle.²⁰ A separate DOJ investigation found a pattern of unconstitutional policing and racial discrimination within the Ferguson Police Department.

Breonna Taylor

On March 13, 2020, Louisville, Kentucky, officers executing a no-knock warrant shot and killed 26-year-old Breonna Taylor in her apartment. The warrant was later found to have been obtained based on an affidavit containing misrepresentations.²¹ Officer Brett Hankison was fired and indicted for wanton endangerment for firing blindly into the apartment. Two other officers involved were eventually terminated. No officer was charged with Taylor’s death. Louisville paid $12 million to settle a wrongful-death suit brought by her family.²² Louisville banned no-knock warrants on June 11, 2020, and similar bills followed at the state and federal levels.²³

What Has Changed Since 2020

Use-of-Force Policies

Among the 100 largest city police departments, the share that prohibit chokeholds climbed from 22% in 2015–2016 to 92% by 2023. Departments requiring officers to intervene when a colleague uses excessive force tripled from 29% to 93% over the same period, and 79% now require officers to attempt de-escalation before using force.²⁴ The Department of Justice prohibits chokeholds and carotid restraints by its own officers unless the legal standard for deadly force is met.²⁵ Since 2020, 45 states have enacted some form of reform-oriented policing legislation, with at least 31 passing laws specifically addressing use of force.

De-Escalation Training

A randomized controlled trial at the Louisville Metro Police Department found that officers who received Integrating Communications, Assessment, and Tactics (ICAT) training had 28% fewer use-of-force incidents, 26% fewer citizen injuries, and 36% fewer officer injuries than a control group. In Tempe, Arizona, trained officers were 58% less likely to injure community members. Congress passed the Law Enforcement De-Escalation Training Act in 2022, authorizing federal funding.²⁶ Experts analyzing the 2025 decline in police killings cited the rollout of de-escalation training, along with staffing shortages, stricter use-of-force policies, and lower crime rates, as possible contributing factors, while cautioning that one year is not yet a trend.¹

Body-Worn Cameras

As of 2020, 79% of local police officers worked in departments that used body cameras, including every department serving populations over one million.²⁷ The research on their effect is mixed. A University of Chicago analysis estimated cameras can reduce use-of-force incidents by nearly 10% and civilian complaints by over 15%, with benefits outweighing costs by about four to one.²⁸ Other studies have found no consistent effect on use of force, and whether cameras improve accountability or community relationships remains unclear.²⁹ Access is becoming a flashpoint. Ohio’s House Bill 315, signed into law in early 2025, authorized agencies to charge up to $75 per hour (capped at $750 per request) for processing body-camera and dash-camera video, which critics said would make it harder for the public and journalists to obtain footage.³⁰

Alternative Crisis Response

Over half of the largest U.S. cities now operate unarmed civilian response teams that handle certain 911 calls instead of armed officers. CAHOOTS in Eugene, Oregon, and STAR in Denver require police backup on roughly 1% of calls or fewer, and no community responder has suffered a major on-the-job injury. A 2022 study of Denver’s STAR program found a 34% drop in low-level crime in areas where the team operated.³¹ Most programs cover only a fraction of their cities, few operate around the clock, and funding is uncertain as pandemic-era grants expire.

Federal Legislation

The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act was reintroduced in September 2025 by Congressman Glenn Ivey with 122 cosponsors. The bill would lower the criminal intent standard for prosecuting officers under federal civil rights law, reform qualified immunity, create a National Police Misconduct Registry, ban chokeholds and no-knock warrants in drug cases, mandate racial bias training and a duty to intervene, and change the federal use-of-force standard from “reasonable” to “necessary.”³² Earlier versions passed the House but stalled in the Senate, and the current version faces long odds.

The Federal Pullback

Federal oversight has shifted sharply. On April 28, 2025, President Trump signed an executive order titled “Strengthening and Unleashing America’s Law Enforcement to Pursue Criminals and Protect Innocent Citizens.” The order told the Attorney General to review all federal consent decrees with state and local police and to “modify, rescind, or move to conclude” those that “unduly impede” policing. It directed the Department of Defense and Attorney General to expand transfers of surplus military equipment to local police, and set up a mechanism to provide legal resources and indemnification to officers facing lawsuits over on-duty conduct.³³

On May 21, 2025, the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division announced it was dismissing pending consent decrees with the Minneapolis and Louisville police departments and closing civil rights investigations into departments in Phoenix, Trenton, Memphis, Mount Vernon, Oklahoma City, and the Louisiana State Police. The DOJ retracted Biden-era findings of constitutional violations in each of those jurisdictions. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon called the prior administration’s consent decrees a “failed experiment of handcuffing local leaders.”³⁴ The administration has signaled it will seek judicial termination of consent decrees in effect in more than a dozen other jurisdictions.³⁵

Consent decrees are enforceable court orders, so the administration must petition judges to end them. Legal analysts have noted that judges can deny those requests when agreements have not been fully implemented, and courts may appoint outside parties to argue for keeping decrees in place when the DOJ steps back.³⁵ Louisville’s mayor and police chief said they would proceed with previously recommended changes, and local activists have pushed the city council to adopt a “People’s Consent Decree.”³⁶

Amnesty International’s 2025 report criticized the executive order for promoting “aggressive policing tactics,” further militarizing local law enforcement, and expanding protections for officers accused of misconduct. The organization also noted that the government has not fully implemented the Death in Custody Reporting Act, which is meant to document deaths caused by law enforcement.⁷

Federal Agents as a New Flashpoint

The expansion of Immigration and Customs Enforcement has produced new allegations of excessive force. ICE has grown to roughly 22,000 employees as of early 2026, and an Associated Press review identified nine ICE employees or contractors charged with crimes over the prior year, including a battery charge against an off-duty agent in Chicago and a guilty plea by a contractor for sexually abusing a detainee in Louisiana.³⁷ Minneapolis authorities are investigating the fatal shootings of two protesters by federal agents in early 2026.³⁸ Immigration personnel shot at least 13 people between September 2025 and February 2026, with at least four of those shootings fatal. More than a dozen legal claims were filed in the second half of 2025 alleging that ICE and Border Patrol agents assaulted or detained individuals without cause, with reported injuries including head trauma, lacerations, and bruises. A federal judge recently said the agency is developing a “troubling culture of lawlessness.” A ProPublica investigation identified at least 40 instances of ICE and DHS agents using carotid chokeholds on individuals, a technique prohibited under the agency’s own use-of-force policy except when deadly force is authorized.

Where Things Stand

The picture in 2026 is split. Police killings dropped for the first time in six years. Chokehold bans, duty-to-intervene requirements, and de-escalation training have become standard in most large departments. Body cameras are nearly universal. Alternative crisis response programs continue to expand. At the same time, the federal government has largely withdrawn from police oversight, dismantling consent decrees, closing investigations, expanding military equipment transfers to local agencies, and strengthening legal protections for officers. Roughly 18,000 American police departments still set their own use-of-force standards, with no single federal law governing when and how officers may use force.²⁴ Whether local reforms hold without federal enforcement is the open question.

1
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2
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3
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5
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8
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9
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10
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11
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15
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16
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17
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18
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19
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20
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21
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22
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23
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24
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29
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30
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31
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32
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33
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34
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35
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36
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37
The Associated Press. Several ICE Agents Were Arrested in Recent Months, Showing Risk of Misconduct
38
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