Use of Force in 2026: What the Numbers Actually Show

For most of the past decade, the annual conversation about police use of force has moved in one direction. The numbers went up, the scrutiny went up, and the gap between what departments promised and what communities experienced never quite seemed to close. Heading into 2026, that story finally has a wrinkle in it.

For the first time since 2019, the count of people killed by police in the United States went down. According to Campaign Zero’s Mapping Police Violence project, at least 1,314 people were killed by law enforcement in 2025, down from at least 1,383 in 2024. That earlier figure was the highest total the group has recorded since it began tracking. The drop works out to roughly 5 percent, and after six straight years of bad news, even a modest decline is the kind of thing that gets people’s attention.

The temptation is to call it a turning point. Most of the people who study this for a living are not ready to do that, and it is worth understanding why before anyone declares the problem solved.

What “use of force” actually means

Part of what makes this subject so slippery is that there is no single national definition of use of force and no single rulebook governing it. The country has nearly 100 federal law enforcement agencies and more than 19,000 state and local ones, and each writes its own policy on when an officer may put hands on someone, draw a weapon, or fire.

What most of those policies share is a common legal floor set by the U.S. Supreme Court. The 1989 decision in Graham v. Connor established the standard of “objective reasonableness.” In plain terms, an officer’s use of force is judged by what a reasonable officer would have done in the same situation, based on the information available in the moment rather than with the benefit of hindsight. The Department of Justice instructs its officers to use “only the force that is objectively reasonable” to gain control of a situation, and only when no feasible alternative exists. The Department of Homeland Security, which employs more federal officers than any other agency, uses similar language. The words are nearly identical. The way they get applied on the street is anything but.

A decline, with an asterisk

The 2025 decline is real, but it is small, and the people who track this data are quick to add the caveats. “You want to have a couple of good years, and you want to begin to gather why we think these things are happening,” Tracie Keesee, a co-founder of the Center for Policing Equity and a former officer with 25 years on the job, told Stateline. “What’s the data not telling us? I think that’s also important.”

There is no shortage of plausible explanations for the dip, which is part of the problem. Researchers point to staffing shortages that have left fewer officers on patrol, the slow spread of de-escalation training and stricter use-of-force rules, and a broader national drop in violent crime that may have reduced the number of high-risk encounters in the first place. Any of those could be driving the number down. So could simple year-to-year noise. One year is a data point, not a trend, and the report’s own authors found no single policy they could draw a straight line from to fewer deaths.

The number we still don’t have

Here is the uncomfortable truth underneath every use-of-force headline. The United States still does not have a complete, authoritative federal count of how often police use force or kill people. The most-cited figures come from outside groups that build their databases out of news reports, public records and other verifiable sources, because the government’s own numbers are incomplete.

The FBI does run a National Use-of-Force Data Collection, launched in 2019, but participation is voluntary. To release national incident totals, the program requires agencies covering at least 80 percent of the country’s law enforcement population to report in. In the 2025 reporting year it reached only 78 percent. That was 12,035 of the nation’s 19,277 agencies, including 94 federal agencies, falling just short of the threshold and, once again, leaving the basic question of how many unanswered. Coverage had climbed from 46 percent in 2019 to 80 percent in 2024 before slipping back.

What the FBI’s data can describe is the shape of these encounters, even if it can’t tell you their frequency. Because the collection only captures incidents involving death, serious injury or the discharge of a firearm, it skews toward the most serious end of the spectrum. Across the program’s five years of data, roughly 30 percent of reported incidents involved someone’s death, about 60 percent involved serious bodily injury, and around 10 percent involved a weapon being fired without injury. More than half, about 54 percent, began as a response to reported unlawful or suspicious activity. Another 13 percent started with a traffic stop, and 7 percent during routine patrol. The single most common form of resistance officers reported was not a weapon or a fight, but a failure to comply with verbal commands.

The gaps got wider in other ways too. The Washington Post’s Fatal Force database, which tracked police shootings from 2015 onward and became a reference point for a generation of reporting, stopped updating in 2025. And the federal government shut down the National Law Enforcement Accountability Database, a registry of misconduct by federal officers. Researchers say these are not just bureaucratic losses. Without consistent data on when and why force is used, it becomes very hard to tell which reforms are working and which only look good on paper.

Geography is destiny

If there is one thing the 2025 data makes clear, it is that a national average hides enormous differences. Rhode Island recorded no police killings at all in 2025. New Jersey had the second-lowest rate in the country, 0.08 killings per 100,000 residents, a 48 percent drop from its own average over the prior 12 years. At the other end, New Mexico had the highest rate at 1.36 per 100,000, more than fifteen times New Jersey’s. At least a dozen cities with populations over 250,000 went the entire year without a single police killing.

The kinds of encounters that turn deadly vary just as much from place to place. In some states, fatal incidents most often grow out of reported violent crime. In others, they begin with a traffic stop, a welfare check, or a call about someone in a mental health crisis, the sort of situation a growing number of departments now argue should not be a police call at all.

New Jersey has become a favorite case study for people who think training drives those numbers. Since 2021, every officer in the state has been required to take a de-escalation course called ICAT, short for Integrating Communication, Assessment and Tactics, built by the Police Executive Research Forum about a decade ago. The program teaches patrol officers to slow tense encounters down, talk people through a crisis, and reach for alternatives before force. “In the last 10 years, we have seen the evolution of police training, especially as it relates to de-escalation,” said Chuck Wexler, the forum’s executive director. ICAT has now been used by roughly 1,500 agencies nationwide.

Wexler is careful not to oversell it. He says the training was unlikely to be the sole reason for New Jersey’s improvement. But his larger point is hard to argue with. “If you don’t change your training and your tactics and how you communicate with people,” he said, “you’re not going to see the change in the areas that you can.” California and Washington have gone a different route, rewriting their laws to permit deadly force only as a last resort. The common thread across the places seeing progress is that somebody changed something on purpose.

Down for whom?

A falling national total can also paper over who is still bearing the weight. The disparities that drove the protests of 2020 have not gone anywhere. Black Americans were still killed by police at more than twice the rate of white Americans in 2025, a gap that held across nearly every state analyzed and was wider in some. Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander, American Indian and Alaska Native, and Hispanic people were also killed at higher rates than white Americans.

Keesee, of the Center for Policing Equity, frames the catch plainly. “The question I always ask is, ‘Police killings are down for who?’” she said. “When you still have racial disparities, that means it might not be perceived that killings are down, especially if you’re in communities where a lot of these things seem to take place.” A 5 percent national improvement does not feel like progress in a neighborhood where the rate never moved.

The federal wild card

There is also a category of force that the headline numbers barely touch. Much of the most-shared footage of aggressive enforcement in late 2025 and early 2026 has involved federal agents, particularly immigration officers. In January, two Minneapolis residents were killed in encounters with federal law enforcement, setting off protests and a fresh national argument about accountability.

Those deaths sit largely outside the Mapping Police Violence count, which does not include deaths during immigration enforcement, and federal agents operate under their own authorities and oversight rather than state law. The result is a strange split screen. A national tally of state and local killings is ticking downward at the same moment that public attention to federal use of force is spiking. Both things are happening, and the data systems we have were not really built to hold them in the same frame.

What to watch in 2026

So is 2026 the year the country finally turned a corner on use of force? Honestly, nobody can say yet, and anyone who tells you otherwise is reading more into one year than the numbers can bear. A single annual decline after a record high is encouraging, not conclusive. What would make it convincing is a second year of the same, paired with a clearer understanding of what actually caused it.

The more useful questions are the ones the experts keep circling back to. Will departments that adopted de-escalation training and tighter use-of-force rules actually stick with them, or quietly let them erode once the spotlight moves on? Will the FBI’s data collection finally clear the threshold that lets the public see a real national count? And will the conversation expand to include federal agents, whose actions are driving much of the current outrage but little of the official data? The headline says force went down. The work of 2026 is figuring out whether that holds, and making sure the gains, wherever they exist, reach the communities that have waited longest for them.

Related reading: EPS Daily Brief, Saturday June 6: Decision season at SCOTUS, deadline season for regulators.

About the Author

Kawika Rogers is Managing Partner at Eight Point Solutions LLC, a veteran-led defense consulting and training firm based in Maryland. He served as an Infantry Team Leader in the United States Marine Corps, then directed the Field Training Officer program and served as an Armorer for Triple Canopy at Camp Arifjan and Camp Buehring in support of Operation Inherent Resolve. He has also served in an advisory and operational capacity in Eastern Europe. Rogers holds over 15 instructor certifications in firearms, defensive tactics, and emergency medicine, and studied International Relations and Global Security at American Military University.

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