Police Killings Fell in 2025. California Alone Still Had 70x More Than England and Wales.

Police killings declined in 2025 for the first time in years, but from a record high

Police in the United States killed 1,202 people in 2025, according to Security.org's compiled tracking, a roughly 5% decrease from 2024's record high of 1,270, marking the first year-over-year decline since 2021. As of March 2026, 201 people had already been killed by police that year, putting 2026 on a broadly similar pace to the prior year.

The scale of the international gap remains genuinely striking, and worth stating precisely: California alone, population roughly 39 million, saw 143 fatal police shootings in 2025. England and Wales, with a combined population of about 60 million, roughly 50% larger, recorded just two fatal police shootings across the entire 2024-2025 period.

The accountability gap: convictions remain extremely rare

Since 2005, only 165 state and local law enforcement officers nationally have been arrested for murder or manslaughter resulting from an on-duty shooting, according to compiled tracking data. Only about 1% of police killings result in officers being criminally charged at all. Qualified immunity, the legal doctrine shielding officers from civil liability in many cases, succeeded as a defense in 57% of police misconduct lawsuits in a widely cited 2020 study.

Racial disparities remain pronounced and consistent across the most recent data: Black Americans make up approximately 12% of the U.S. population but accounted for 24% of people killed by police in 2025, twice their population share. Separately, officers with prior misconduct complaints on their record are three times more likely to be involved in a subsequent fatal shooting, according to the same compiled analysis.

Body cameras show real, measurable effects, but the evidence is more nuanced than simple before/after comparisons suggest

• A Rialto, California study, one of the most frequently cited body-camera studies, found a 59% drop in use-of-force incidents and an 88% drop in complaints against officers during the department's first year of body camera implementation
• Orlando, Florida saw a 37% decrease in use-of-force incidents following body camera deployment, and Las Vegas Metro Police saw an 11.5% reduction in use-of-force reports
• Nationally, body-worn cameras are associated with roughly a 10% reduction in police use of force on average, and can increase the probability of officer discipline by up to 20% in certain jurisdictions, according to compiled 2026 tracking data
• Despite broad public support (89% of U.S. adults, and 92% of Black Americans specifically, support body camera use according to survey data), implementation costs remain a genuine practical obstacle: Seattle's police department alone spends over $100,000 annually just on redacting body camera video for public release, and hardware replacement costs typically equal 20% of the initial investment every three years

A specific, sobering case study on the limits of reform alone

One large metropolitan department's experience, cited in Security.org's analysis, offers an important caveat to reform optimism: despite nearly $40 million spent on reform efforts over a decade, including mandatory body cameras, extensive new training, and stricter use-of-force policies, that department's shooting rate did not meaningfully decline. This doesn't contradict the positive body-camera findings from Rialto or Orlando specifically, but it does illustrate that reform effectiveness appears to vary substantially by department and local context, not as a single, guaranteed outcome that automatically follows from adopting these policies.

The core disagreement

Reform advocates generally argue the data, particularly the international comparison and the persistent racial disparity figures, shows current accountability structures, especially qualified immunity and the rarity of criminal charges, are inadequate relative to the scale of police-involved deaths, and point to Rialto and Orlando-style body camera results as evidence targeted reforms can work when implemented seriously. Reform skeptics generally argue officers face genuinely dangerous, split-second decisions that raw statistics don't fully capture, and point to cases like the department that spent $40 million without measurable improvement as evidence that reform mandates alone, without addressing underlying local conditions, don't reliably produce results. Both sides broadly agree that 45 states have enacted some form of reform-oriented policing legislation since 2020, showing this is an area where substantial policy movement has already occurred even amid the ongoing disagreement over what's actually working.