The NYPD Shoots and Kills Less Often Than Cops in the Rest of the Country

On July 17, NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo brutally choked to
death Eric
Garner, an unarmed man. On November 20, NYPD Officer Peter
Liang
shot and killed Akai Gurley, who was also unarmed, in the
stairwell of a Brooklyn housing project. On December 9, an NYPD
officer
shot and killed Calvin Peters, who had just stabbed another man
at a Brooklyn synagogue and reportedly lunged at the police with a
knife. Last week, NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton
announced that the department would purchase an additional 450
tasers as a “nonlethal method officers could use.”

One of the most common chants at the two anti-police abuse
protests I covered recently (see here and here) was: “NYPD,
KKK, how many people did you kill today?” 

Let’s be clear: One fatal shooting by a cop is one fatal
shooting too many. And the horrifying murder of Eric Garner is
indicative of big problems at the NYPD, and let’s hope that the
recent protests lead to meaningful reforms.

But when attending these protests, one might get the
misimpression that the NYPD stands out among the nation’s police
departments in its overuse of deadly force. In fact, New York cops
shoot and kill many fewer people than cops in the rest of the
country. And fatal shootings by the NYPD have fallen significantly
over the years.

In 2013,
eight people were shot and killed by the NYPD. New York City
had 8.4 million residents in 2013, so that works out to about one
fatal shooting per million residents. As
Scott Shackford has noted, there are no reliable national stats
to compare this to. But even if we accept the FBI’s lowball figure
of 461 fatal shootings by cops in 2013 (the real figure may be more
than double that), that translates to 1.5 people killed by cops for
every one million U.S. residents, or a rate that’s about 50 percent
higher than in New York City.

And the historical numbers demonstrate
that—thankfully—ubiquitous cameras and social media are raising
public awareness of these issues. In 1971—both an unusually violent
year and the first year the NYPD started reporting these stats—93
people were shot and killed by cops in New York City. The city’s
population was 7.8 million in 1971, so that works out to about 12
killings for every million residents!

I put together a chart (see below) showing how fatal shootings
by the NYPD have fallen since 1971 per million New York City
residents.

H/T: Harry Siegel’s
Twitter feed.