One in four law enforcement agencies are reporting use-of-force data to the FBI

Law enforcement agencies including police departments and sheriff’s offices began voluntarily sharing the data in 2019, with the Chicago Police Department being the largest agency participating. The FBI says it needs more participation before it can publish the data.

Updated on Tue, October 27, 2020 by the USAFacts Team

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Law enforcement agencies representing 41% of the nation’s sworn officers provided use-of-force data to the FBI in 2019, its first year of collecting such data.

Out of 18,514 federal, state, local, and tribal law enforcement agencies in the United States, 5,043 or 27%, of the agencies provided data voluntarily to the FBI.

The data reported includes use-of-force incidents of the following types:

Death of a person due to law enforcement use of force.
Serious bodily injury of a person due to law enforcement use of force.
Discharge of a firearm by law enforcement at or in the direction of a person not otherwise resulting in death or serious bodily injury.

The use-of-force data compiled from the reports has not been made public. According to the FBI, the federal agency says it will not present aggregated data until law enforcement agencies representing more than 80% of the nation’s officers participate. It estimates there are 860,000 sworn officers in the United States.

The FBI did release a list of the law enforcement agencies submitting data that included incidence reports of use of force or said they didn’t have any reports.

The Chicago Police Department, which had 13,138 sworn officers in 2018, is the largest police department represented in the data. The New York Police Department, the only law enforcement agency in the nation that's larger than Chicago's, did not submit data.

The FBI also released data showing a monthly average of 66 law enforcement agencies filing use-of-force reports. The monthly average for agencies reporting no use-of-force reports was 4,286. Not every agency submitted a report every month.

Monthly responses of law enforcement agencies participating in FBI use-of-force data collection

No federal agency publicly provides timely, comprehensive data on excessive use of force and officer-involved shootings annually. The Bureau of Justice Statistics does provide two excessive police force datasets, but the most recent report is from 2016.

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