The Washington Post’s now-shuttered Fatal Force database — ‘designed to inform or inflame?’
On January 1, 2025, the Washington Post quietly stopped updating its popular Fatal Force database, which had purported to be the most complete list of nationwide fatal police shootings. The database had been recognized with Pulitzer, Peabody, and Polk awards for journalism.
The data remains accessible for the years 2015-2024. But while the database has some value in its attempt to list all fatal police shootings, it is plagued by inaccuracies, insinuations, and omissions that taint its overall value and rightfully lead to accusations of creating false narratives, which have harmed public safety.
Why it began
The Post created the database in 2015 following the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.
One of the reasons for creating the database was accurate — the Justice Department was not, and still is not, mandating all law enforcement agencies across the nation to report fatal uses of force as part of their crime data reporting.
Instead, agencies are asked to voluntarily participate in providing data to the FBI’s National Use of Force Data Collection. As of 2024, according to R Street Institute, just 57% of law enforcement agencies reported data to this collection. However, those agencies represented 68% of the nation’s law enforcement officers, and if an agency did not have at least one qualifying incident to report, they were not counted in the total.
The bottom line is police shootings are among the most significant incidents that happen in law enforcement, and a significant amount of scrutiny rightfully follows them. It is in our collective best interest that our federal government begin mandating the ongoing collection of national use-of-force data, especially fatal shootings, so that accurate and meaningful evaluation of trends can take place.
Absent such a mandate, we can expect more flawed efforts like the Fatal Force database to emerge.
The flaws in Fatal Force
Over the years there have been several examinations of the Fatal Force database, many finding significant fault with it. Two of these have come in the past year — one from City Journal titled, “Fact-Checking a Police-Shooting Database,” and the other from The Spectator World, titled “The Washington Post ends toxic narrative that cops are hunting black men.”
Both pieces point out that the Washington Post’s intention with the Fatal Force database seemed to be more focused on inflaming tensions than on informing us of the facts surrounding police shootings.
The City Journal examination of Fatal Force found multiple examples of “sloppy” data collection and reporting. Examples included listing cases as fatal when they were not; characterizing all those shot and killed as “victims” when the overwhelming majority were criminal assailants shot by police who were defending themselves and others; characterizing many of these assailants as “unarmed” when they were armed, had been armed up to the point of the shooting, or had made movements or gestures indicating they were armed; and misidentifying the race of assailants.
All of this led City Journal to note that the Washington Post was presenting “its data with an eye toward shaping public opinion — framing police shootings through the lens of race and the language of victimization.”
The Spectator World’s examination was equally critical, saying, “Let’s be clear, the “Fatal Force” database didn’t just compile data; it crafted a storyline. It presented fatal police shootings in isolation, stripped of context and devoid of nuance. No breakdown of the circumstances. No mention of weapons. No differentiation between justified use of force and actual misconduct. Just names, faces and the unspoken suggestion that racism was always the root cause.
This is what passes for journalism in our elite institutions: insinuation over evidence, narrative over nuance.”
Why we should care
Supporting accurate and complete data collection involving fatal police shootings is vitally important. Why? Because in the absence of accurate data, inaccurate narratives take shape that have profound effects that damage our public safety.
The City Journal article highlights this by noting a recent national poll showing that Americans believe police shoot and kill 1,800 unarmed black people per year. The problem with that perception is that it is inflated 100 times higher than the actual number, and most of those “unarmed” people were, in fact, armed leading up to the shooting, or represented an articulable threat that led to the shooting.
The Journal also calculated that “police use force of any type in less than one-tenth of one percent of all 911 calls,” and that police fatally shoot someone in less than 0.002 percent of all police-citizen encounters.
According to David Sypher Jr., an African American freelance writer and author of The Spectator World’s article, the result of efforts like the Fatal Force database has been, “A decade of racial paranoia, collapsing trust in law enforcement and a political culture where slogans like “defund the police” could flourish in the mainstream. The human cost of this narrative cannot be overstated. Police pulled back from proactive enforcement in high-crime neighborhoods. Officers left the profession in droves. And the very communities that activists claimed to defend were left to face soaring crime and chaos.”
Sypher went on to say, “But when crime is high, police presence follows. It must. And when police presence is high, so too is the probability of interaction, arrest, and — yes — conflict. This isn’t racism. It’s math.
The idea that this basic dynamic can be reduced to a racial morality play — black victim versus white oppressor — is not only wrong, it’s dangerous. It cultivates fear. It discourages cooperation with law enforcement. It teaches young black men that any contact with a cop is a threat to their life, instead of an opportunity for protection, resolution, or correction.
And it has consequences. In cities across America, police officers have scaled back traffic stops, foot patrols and street-level enforcement, not because they don’t care — but because they’re being watched like predators and punished like criminals for doing their jobs. That vacuum doesn’t lead to peace. It leads to unchecked violence.”
Sypher aptly concluded, “I’m a black man who supports police reform where it makes sense. But reform must be grounded in facts, not feelings. Real accountability is built on a foundation of data, not emotional storytelling. What the Washington Post did was offer a half-truth, repackaged as moral clarity. But a half-truth is still a lie — and this one has done real damage.
If the Post wants to shut down its database, fine. But let’s not pretend the story ends there. The narrative they helped shape still dominates our culture. It lives on in our schools, in our politics and in our popular media. And until we start telling the whole truth about policing — about crime, community, and the hard work of building public trust — we’ll stay trapped in a cycle of mistrust and misunderstanding.
You want better policing? Start with better reporting.”