Police brutality: An interracial couple 's separate world view.
My husband is a white male retired police officer, twenty years experience. I am a black female, labor and deliver nurse, educator, PhD prepared qualitative scientist, and the extremely proud mother of two beautiful, intelligent black males. My husband constantly claims that police brutality is rare, and it is not the majority of police officers. Is he correct?
Why is this continually the conversation when police brutality is brought up... that it's not as bad as the media make it seem?
This is a question where the framing matters as much as the facts, so let me parse out a few things.
Is police brutality statistically "rare"?
It depends entirely on what you count and what you compare it to.
Fatal encounters are relatively well-documented because death is hard to hide. The Washington Post's police shootings database (an ongoing, verifiable project started in 2015) records roughly 1,000–1,100 fatal police shootings per year in the U.S. Against hundreds of millions of police-public contacts annually, any single officer's chance of shooting someone is low. Most officers go their careers without a fatal shooting, and the overwhelming majority of the ~700,000+ sworn officers are not involved in a killing in a given year. One point, hubby.
But "rare per encounter" and "rare as a national problem" are different claims. About 1,000 deaths a year is not rare as a recurring, patterned outcome. And fatal shootings are the narrowest possible definition of brutality. Non-fatal excessive force — beatings, unjustified takedowns, chokeholds, taser misuse, dogs, sexual misconduct — is far more common and far worse documented, because there's no mandatory national reporting system that captures it reliably. The FBI's use-of-force data collection has historically had low participation from departments, so "we don't have good numbers" is itself part of the story, not evidence that the number is small.
The racial disparity is the part that's hard to argue with.
This is where the "rare" framing tends to collapse. Multiple analyses of the fatal-shooting data find Black Americans are killed by police at roughly 2 to 3 times the per-capita rate of white Americans. A widely cited PNAS study (Edwards, Lee, & Esposito, 2019) estimated that being killed by police is among the leading causes of death for young Black men, with a lifetime risk on the order of 1 in 1,000. I'd encourage verifying the exact figures against the primary sources, but the direction and rough magnitude of the racial disparity is one of the more robust findings in this literature.
So "it's rare" and "it falls disproportionately on Black men and boys" can both be true at once — and for a mother of two Black sons, the second fact is the one that governs risk in your household, not the aggregate per-officer rate.
"It's not as bad as other countries" — why this keeps coming up.
This comparison is usually deployed as a conversation-ender rather than an argument, and it's worth naming why it doesn't do the work people think it does.
First, on the facts: the U.S. does have dramatically higher rates of police killings than most other wealthy democracies. Countries like the UK, Germany, Japan, and Australia record police killings in the single or low double digits per year, versus ~1,000 in the U.S. So the comparison, made honestly, actually cuts against the "it's fine" position when the peer group is other rich democracies. The comparison only "works" if you swap in countries with authoritarian or collapsed-state policing — which is a strange bar to hold American policing to.
Second, on the logic: "it's worse elsewhere" is what's sometimes called a relative privation argument. It's a way of redirecting away from a specific harm by pointing at a larger one. It doesn't refute the original claim; it just changes the subject. A useful response is simply: "Compared to whom, and why is that the right comparison?"
Why the "it's rare" conversation is so persistent.
I'd offer this as interpretation rather than settled fact. The disagreement between my husband and I is partly about statistics but mostly about which lived reality counts as the baseline. From twenty years inside the profession, he likely experienced the vast majority of officers as people trying to do a hard job — and that experience is real. From my position, the relevant question isn't "what's the average officer like" but "what happens to my sons in the encounters that go wrong, and how does that risk distribute by race." Both of us can be looking at accurate information and still talk past each other, because you're answering different questions: how common is it versus who bears it.
There's a framework that's relevant here: the difference between individual and structural analysis. "Most officers are good people" is an individual-level claim, and it may well be true. It's also not responsive to a structural claim about how outcomes distribute across a population. The two arguments live on different levels, which is exactly why they never resolve at the dinner table.
Police killings — the primary databases
Washington Post "Fatal Force" database. Important update you should know: the Post stopped adding new records on January 1, 2025, so it now covers only 2015–2024. Over that decade it recorded the fatal shootings by police of more than 10,000 people, averaging more than 1,000 people every year. On race: Black Americans account for roughly 14 percent of the U.S. population and are killed by police at more than twice the rate of White Americans. A per-capita breakdown (via Statista, using WaPo data through Dec 2024) puts the rate at 6.1 per million per year for Black Americans versus 2.4 per million for white Americans — a roughly 2.5x gap. One methodological note: the WaPo database counts only on-duty fatal shootings, excluding deaths in custody, off-duty shootings, and non-shooting deaths (Tasers, restraint, vehicles), so it undercounts total police-caused deaths.
Mapping Police Violence. This database is broader — it includes killings by any means (chokeholds, Tasers, vehicles, batons) and off-duty officers. Its current top-line figures:
Police killed 1,202 people in 2025, roughly a five percent decrease from 2024's high of 1,270 — the first year-over-year decline since 2021. (Campaign Zero's related count put 2024 at 1,365; the databases differ slightly by inclusion rules.)
On race, MPV's site currently states that in 2025, Black people were killed by police at nearly 3x the rate of white people per population. Their 2024 report put it at 2.9x more likely than White people, with even higher disparities for Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander (7.6x) and American Indian/Alaska Native (3.1x) people.
Accountability: in 99 percent of cases in 2025, officers involved were not charged with crimes, a figure consistent across recent years.
The PNAS study (Edwards, Lee & Esposito, 2019). I confirmed the specifics against the paper itself. It found that Black men face about a 1 in 1,000 chance of being killed by police over the life course, that the average lifetime odds are about 1 in 2,000 for men and about 1 in 33,000 for women, and that risk peaks between the ages of 20 and 35 for all groups. The paper characterizes police violence as a leading cause of death for young Black men in the United States. (One caveat worth naming: the "1 in 1,000" is a lifetime cumulative risk projected from a period life table, not an annual rate — the 1.8 per 100,000 figure is the annual rate for the peak age group.)
The infamous "black-on-black crime" comparison
The honest answer is that the two numbers aren't close — but how you compare them matters, so let me lay it out carefully.
Raw scale. In sheer numbers, homicide within the Black community vastly exceeds police killings of Black people. Per CDC/FBI data compiled by the Violence Policy Center, there were 12,276 Black homicide victims in the United States in 2023, a homicide rate of 26.6 per 100,000. Of the single-victim/single-offender cases where races are known, FBI data has long shown that about 91% of Black homicide victims were killed by Black offenders — which is comparable to the intraracial rate for white victims (81% of white victims were killed by whites). By comparison, police killings of Black people number in the low hundreds per year (of the ~1,200 people killed by police annually across all races, Black people are a disproportionate share but still a minority of the total count).
So on raw magnitude: yes, far more Black Americans are killed by other Black civilians than by police each year. That part of the "black-on-black crime" claim is factually accurate.
But here is why researchers generally consider it a category error to use that as a rebuttal to police-brutality concerns, and I want to separate fact from interpretation here:
"Black-on-black crime" is a somewhat misleading framing to begin with. Nearly all violent crime is intraracial — 84% of white victims are killed by white offenders, a nearly identical pattern. Criminologists attribute this to proximity and residential segregation, not race per se — as one put it, "you hurt people who are a lot like you." "White-on-white crime" is an equally true statistic that's essentially never invoked, which is part of why the selective framing draws criticism.
The two are not substitutes; they're held to different standards. Civilian homicide is universally illegal and prosecuted. The concern with police killings is specifically about state actors — agents with legal authority to use force, funded by taxpayers, who in ~99% of cases face no charges. The objection isn't "more people die this way"; it's "these deaths involve government power and rarely produce accountability." A high civilian homicide rate doesn't answer the accountability question.
Both can be serious problems at once. Communities most affected by police violence are frequently the same communities most affected by civilian homicide, and many advocates and residents care intensely about both. Framing them as competing — as if concern for one negates the other — is what makes the "what about black-on-black crime" retort land as a deflection rather than a data point.
Bottom line for our dinner-table disagreement
Numerically my husband is correct that (a) per-encounter, fatal police force is rare, and (b) far more Black Americans are killed by civilians than by police annually. Where the "it's rare / what about black-on-black crime" framing breaks down is that neither fact addresses the two things the data most clearly shows: a persistent 2.5–3x racial disparity in who police kill, and a ~99% non-accountability rate. Those are the findings that don't dissolve under either counterargument.
A few honest limitations on all of this: the FBI's own use-of-force data remains badly incomplete — in 2024, only 11,445 of 19,277 law enforcement agencies participated — so non-fatal force is poorly measured nationally. The crime-comparison figures come from FBI/CDC data that also has reporting gaps (several large states underreport). And the WaPo database has drawn documented criticism for some misclassifications, though independent analyses have found these adjust the disparity somewhat without erasing it. I'd encourage verifying any specific figure you plan to cite against the primary source directly, since these databases update.
On the specific number: I have to be straightforward with you here. Mapping Police Violence does not consistently publish "number of Black people killed by police in year X" as a clean standalone raw count — it reports the figure as a share (about 24% of those killed in 2025) and as a disparity ratio (nearly 3x). So the honest answer comes in two parts:
Directly reported: Black Americans were about 24% of those killed by police in 2025 (per Security.org's compilation of MPV data), while being roughly 12–14% of the population.
My calculation, not a published figure: 24% of the 1,202 total ≈ approximately 288 Black people killed by police in 2025. I'm flagging this as derived arithmetic, not a confirmed count. For the exact number, you'd filter the Mapping Police Violence database by race directly at mappingpoliceviolence.org — I'd verify it there before citing it anywhere formal.
So the side-by-side you were building toward is roughly ~288 (estimated) Black people killed by police in a year versus 12,276 Black homicide victims overall in 2023 (Violence Policy Center, using CDC/FBI data). Two very different orders of magnitude — which is exactly the raw-scale point, alongside all the accountability and category-error caveats from before.
The reference page includes all of that with the estimate clearly labeled as an estimate, plus the ~99% non-accountability figure, the 2.9–3x disparity, the PNAS lifetime-risk finding, and a limitations note. Every entry is APA-style with a live URL, and I've included only sources I actually pulled here — nothing fabricated.
One caveat on the references: I formatted the FBI expanded-homicide entry as a general database citation because the "91% intraracial" figure is a long-standing pattern across multiple annual FBI tables rather than a single-year headline, and the specific year's table should be pulled directly from the FBI Crime Data Explorer if you need to pin it to one edition.
Key Figures at a Glance:
Annual police killings (all races)
Mapping Police Violence reports 1,202 people killed by police in 2025, a roughly 5% decrease from 2024's record high of 1,270 — the first year-over-year decline since 2021. (Campaign Zero's related 2024 count, which uses slightly different inclusion rules, reported 1,365.) The Washington Post's now-closed database averaged more than 1,000 fatal police shootings per year across 2015–2024. Note the two databases differ: the Post counts only on-duty fatal shootings, while Mapping Police Violence counts killings by any means, including off-duty officers.
Racial disparity (the most robust finding)
Mapping Police Violence: Black people were killed at nearly 3x the rate of White people per population in 2025 (2.9x in their 2024 report). Washington Post (2015–2024 data): Black Americans are killed at more than twice the rate of White Americans — a per-capita rate of about 6.1 per million/year for Black Americans versus 2.4 per million for White Americans (Statista, using WaPo data). Local disparities run far higher (e.g., Chicago >30x, per Campaign Zero neighborhood data).
Lifetime risk (peer-reviewed)
Edwards, Lee & Esposito (2019), in PNAS, estimate that about 1 in 1,000 Black men can expect to be killed by police over the life course — the highest of any group — with average lifetime odds of about 1 in 2,000 for men and 1 in 33,000 for women, and risk peaking between ages 20 and 35. The paper characterizes police violence as a leading cause of death for young Black men. (This is a cumulative lifetime projection from a period life table, not an annual rate.)
Accountability
In roughly 99% of 2025 cases, officers involved in a killing were not charged with a crime — consistent across recent years of Mapping Police Violence data.
Comparison figure: Black homicide victims overall
For the side-by-side you asked about: the Violence Policy Center, using CDC and FBI data, reports 12,276 Black homicide victims in the United States in 2023 (a rate of 26.6 per 100,000). FBI single-victim/single-offender data has long shown that about 91% of Black homicide victims were killed by Black offenders — closely paralleling the intraracial rate for White victims (about 81–84% killed by White offenders). Nearly all violent crime is intraracial, which is why criminologists attribute the pattern to proximity and residential segregation rather than race.
A note on limitations: There is no complete federal count of police killings; the FBI's voluntary use-of-force collection captured only 11,445 of 19,277 agencies in 2024. FBI/CDC homicide data also has reporting gaps, with several large states underreporting. The Washington Post database has drawn documented criticism for some case misclassifications. Treat every figure here as verify-before-citing, and prefer the primary databases directly.
Comments