Officer-Involved Deaths in Arizona, 2010–2019

Includes:
-Yearly deaths by race
-Proportions of yearly deaths by race
-State racial demographics

Sources:

2 thoughts on “Officer-Involved Deaths in Arizona, 2010–2019”

  1. Would be helpful to include what percentage of the population each of these groups are. The raw numbers are already scary to me.

    1. That’s in the lower table.

      I would hope that these figures would be somewhat comforting. In a state with a population of 7 million, if 45 people are killed in incidents involving cops, that means your chance of dying that year in an incident involving police was less than a thousandth of a percent, regardless of race. That’s a little more likely than your chances of getting struck by lightning (0.0006% vs 0.0001% chance).

      You may want to look at the details as well. For example, one of these deaths was an Asian-American cop in Tucson who was tased as part of a training exercise. He seemed fine afterward but died the next day. (To be clear, I understand that tasers can kill people, but they are much less deadly than guns.)

      Another incident involved police chasing someone in a car. The driver lost control and crashed. One of his passengers, a black person, died in the accident. One of the people coded by law enforcement as black was actually Arabic, a guy from Qatar. (However, incorrect categorization seems to be rare in this dataset.)

      Yes, a lot of these people were shot to death, but many of the reports suggest that they were armed and that police were called because the person was threatening a family member with a weapon, usually a gun or knife.

      All of those details are in the spreadsheet, and I think they’re worth looking at.

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