"A deep exploration of police shootings in America, informed by the most comprehensive data yet assembled on notoriously non-transparent topic. As much attention as police violence has garnered in recent years, one central frustration has stymied attempts to understand exactly what is happening, why, and to whom: the lack of data on use of force. This project pulls together the results of a massive data-gathering project on police shootings from all US cities with over 100,000 people. The authors use this information to answer pressing questions-and reveal much needed insight-around police shootings in America today. The authors explore first why it is so difficult to get good data on police shootings and provide fascinating and troubling details on the difficulty-and sometimes, impossibility-of getting records from police departments, and what strategies are needed to put together nation-wide numbers that are complete as possible. They then turn to central questions and their answers, pointing out surprising insights as they go. In exploring how many officer-involved shootings happen in a city, for instance, they find that oversight boards and the political orientation of city leadership have little impact, but that the size of the police force does. And, intriguingly, as one considers movements to defund the police, they find police shootings are highest in cities with under-resourced officers-indicating that some efforts to "defang" forces may have the opposite effect. Later chapters look at where within cities shootings happen, the demographics of victims, and the fatality rate of shootings. The authors end the book by considering what these new data tell us about how to decrease the frequency and deadliness of armed actions by American police"--