After a police officer killed George Floyd on a Minneapolis street corner in 2020, millions of people flooded the streets of American cities demanding an end to brutal police tactics that too often proved fatal to those in custody.
Yet five years later, despite the largest racial justice protests since the civil rights era of the 1960s and a wave of measures to improve training and hold officers more accountable, the number of people killed by the police continues to rise each year, and Black Americans still die in disproportionate numbers.
Last year, the police killed at least 1,226 people, an 18 percent increase over 2019, the year before Mr. Floyd was killed, according to an analysis by The New York Times drawing on data compiled by The Washington Post and the nonprofit Mapping Police Violence. The vast majority of such cases have been shootings, and the vast majority of the people killed were reported to be armed. But police officers, as in the past, also killed people who had no weapon at all, some in the same manner as Mr. Floyd: pinned down by an officer and yelling, “I can’t breathe.”
Among them was Frank Tyson, an unarmed Black man in Canton, Ohio, who uttered Mr. Floyd’s famous words last year before dying when he was wrestled to the ground in a bar by police officers. This happened even though police departments around the country, especially in the aftermath of Mr. Floyd’s murder, have known about the dangers of asphyxiation when keeping a suspect in the prone position. (Two officers were charged with homicide in Mr. Tyson’s death.)
Derek Chauvin, the officer who knelt on Mr. Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes as he gasped for air, was convicted and sentenced to prison, along with three other officers who were on the scene. But even as the number of police killings has risen in the years since, it has remained exceedingly rare for officers to be charged with crimes for those deaths.
Last year, for example, 16 officers were charged with either murder or manslaughter in a fatal shooting, the same number as in 2020, according to data tracked by Philip M. Stinson, a professor of criminal justice at Bowling Green State University in Ohio.
Mr. Stinson said that given “all of the promise of five years ago, in terms of the promises of police reform, from where I sit, the reality is that policing hasn’t changed.”
Experts say it is difficult to draw definitive answers from the data about why police killings continue to rise without an analysis of the circumstances of each case. But they have plenty of theories about what may have contributed to the problem.
An increasing number of guns in circulation heightens the chances of deadly encounters. A backlash against the police reform movement in conservative states may have empowered the police in those places. And the decline in public trust in the police after Mr. Floyd’s murder may have led to more deadly encounters.
“Public perception of policing can matter here,” said Seth Stoughton, a former police officer who is a law professor at the University of South Carolina and frequently testifies about use-of-force policies in criminal trials of officers. “When police are viewed as more legitimate, folks are more likely to comply. When police are viewed as less legitimate, people are less likely to comply and more likely to resist, and that can increase the rates of violence.”
While answers may be elusive, here are some of the underlying trends that might explain the shifting nature of police violence in the United States.
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