The number of police uses of lethal force is on the decline according to a new report from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Researchers with the school’s Cline Center for Advanced Social Research compiled data to track and identify the use of lethal force by officers throughout the country. They found that from 2021 to 2023 the number of such incidents fell by 24 percent nationally. The drop was about the same in Illinois.
The report includes any incident in which police used a firearm, including those with nonfatal outcomes, as well as any other use of force that resulted in a death. But it doesn’t draw conclusions as to why the decrease is occurring.
“Police uses of lethal force have decreased dramatically since 2021,” Althaus said. “We don’t know why we’re seeing this decrease,” Althaus said. “Our role is to rigorously document these incidents so that others can use SPOTLITE data to better understand what is happening around the country and why.”
According to the report, in 2021, there were 3,474 uses of lethal force by police in the U.S. In 2022, that number decreased to 2,842 incidents. In 2023, the number dropped further to 2,631, the smallest annual number since 2015.
In Cook County, the report shows a decline in the use of lethal force from 53 incidents in 2021 to 33 in 2023.
The state of Illinois, as a whole, saw a 23 percent drop, from 96 in 2021 to 74 in 2023, ranking it eighth in the nation.
“This is an ongoing data collection project. The Cline Center Spotlight project aims to rebuild trust between law enforcement agencies and the communities they serve by making accountability information more visible and useful for both communities and policing agencies,” said Scott Althaus, the Merriam professor of political science at the U of I and the director of the Cline Center.
The report does not rely on government data, but instead on local news reports of police shooting incidents, police pursuits and other uses of police force that results in a death. The report uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to augment the work of human analysts.
“We leverage artificial intelligence techniques where we can be confident that they are producing results that are about the same as if we had highly trained human analysts extracting information from news reports,” Althaus said.
He said all the incident counts “are human verified by highly trained analysts.”
Ajay Singh, assistant director of strategic research initiatives and a research scientist at the Cline Center called the undertaking “a huge amount of work.”
According to the report, from 2022 to 2023, 91% of the civilians involved in police uses of lethal force were male. Black people made up 35% of the incidents, despite being just 12% of the population according to the 2020 census.
Michael Puente is a reporter and weekend anchor at WBEZ. Reach him at mpuente@wbez.org.