From [HERE] The number of fatal police shootings across the country rose again last year, with officers killing 1,096 people, including a 2-year-old girl caught in a standoff.

Last year saw the most incidents since The Washington Post started tracking the deaths in its Fatal Force database in 2015, after a police officer killed Michael Brown, an unarmed Black teenager in Ferguson, Mo.

There were only 15 days without such a shooting in 2022.

Since 2017, the number has increased every year, and is now up about 10 percent compared with just three years ago. But criminologists caution that more data is needed to understand what is driving the rise.

“It’s hard to know if the increase is meaningful or random,” said Justin Nix, an associate professor of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. “We really need a better understanding of when police shoot and injure people, but more so when police avoid shooting someone.”

The pace stayed consistently high in 2022 compared with prior years. Last year, officers killed about 90 people nearly every month, a tally reached only a handful of times in each of the past seven years.

With more than 18,000 police departments nationwide, it’s difficult to pinpoint a single reason for the increase, experts said. The rate of violent crime dropped steadily after 2016 but has climbed higher since 2020. Last year, only 49 police officers were shot and killed in the line of duty, compared with 61 the year before, according to FBI data.

The demographics of those killed have remained largely the same: While more White people were shot and killed by police overall last year, Black people were killed at a rate 2.5 times higher based on their percentage of the population.

Data on fatal police shootings remains sparse. The Federal Bureau of Investigation asks state and local departments to contribute voluntarily to its collection efforts. But in the past eight years, the bureau has recorded fewer police shootings each year even as The Post’s count has increased.

In 2019, the FBI started a new use-of-force data collection, which is not yet publicly available. So far, the bureau said that 10,000 law enforcement departments have contributed. But The Post found that more than 200 departments whose officers had fatally shot someone were not on the FBI’s list.

In a statement, the FBI said that it “makes every effort through its editing procedures, training practices, and agency outreach” to ensure its data is accurate, but that local departments are responsible for what they report. [MORE]