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Sources of organizational variability in fatal police shootings in the USA

Nature Human Behaviour volume 9, pages 1113–1121 (2025)Cite this article

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Abstract

The rate of fatal shootings by officers is highly variable across American police agencies, yet the reasons for this variability remain unclear. This study uses Bayesian multilevel models to partition the variation in fatal police shooting rates across 2,727 police agencies between 2015 and 2020 into 3 sources of variability: randomness, differences in social context, and outlier agencies that have exceptionally higher or lower rates than is predicted by observed factors. The results indicate that variation in police shooting rates across agencies is far from random and is primarily associated with differences in social contexts, especially differences in crime rates, 911 call rates, officers per capita and the prevalence of guns. However, even after accounting for extensive differences in contexts, several police agencies consistently have lower or higher police shooting rates than predicted.

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Fig. 1: Simulated versus observed shooting rates of largest agencies.
Fig. 2: Simulated police shootings under counterfactual scenarios.
Fig. 3: Estimated random intercepts of police agencies.
Fig. 4: Map of outlier agencies.

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Data availability

The data to reproduce the findings of this study are publicly available through the Harvard Dataverse repository at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/TU0BNU.

Code availability

The code to reproduce the findings of this study is publicly available through the Harvard Dataverse repository at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/TU0BNU.

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Acknowledgements

The authors received no specific funding for this work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics, Statistics and Sociology, RAND, Santa Monica, CA, USA

    Roland Neil

  2. Department of Criminology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA

    John M. MacDonald & Anthony A. Braga

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  1. Roland Neil
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  2. John M. MacDonald
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  3. Anthony A. Braga
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Contributions

R.N. designed research, analysed data and wrote the article. J.M.M. designed research and wrote the article. A.A.B. wrote the article.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Roland Neil.

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Competing interests

R.N. is employed at RAND, which did not have a role in this research. The other authors declare no competing interests.

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Nature Human Behaviour thanks Ashley Arnio, Rajiv Sethi and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Peer reviewer reports are available.

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Supplementary Information

Supplementary Notes A–G, Figs. 1–16 and Tables 1–9.

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Neil, R., MacDonald, J.M. & Braga, A.A. Sources of organizational variability in fatal police shootings in the USA. Nat Hum Behav 9, 1113–1121 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-025-02169-7

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