At least 1,314 people were killed by police in the United States in 2025, marking the first annual decrease since 2019, according to a report from Campaign Zero. The figure represents a drop from 2024, when at least 1,383 people were killed by law enforcement — the highest number recorded since the group began tracking the data.

The decline amounts to 69 fewer deaths compared with the prior year. Among individual states, New Jersey had one of the lowest rates of police killings in 2025, at 0.08 per 100,000 people, according to the report.

The 2025 numbers do not include deaths during immigration enforcement. Federal agents operate under different authorities and standards than state and local police. Photos and videos of aggressive law enforcement involving federal immigration agents have circulated on social media in 2025, but incidents involving federal immigration agents fall outside the scope of the Campaign Zero data.

Tracie Keesee, co-founder of the Center for Policing Equity and associate professor of public safety and justice at the University of Virginia School of Continuing and Professional Studies, urged caution in drawing conclusions from a single year of data. Keesee has 25 years of law enforcement experience.

"You want to have a couple of good years, and you want to begin to gather why we think these things are happening," Keesee said.

Keesee also pointed to gaps in the available information. "What do we not know? What's the data not telling us? I think that's also important," she said.

There is no comprehensive federal government database tracking police use of force, and the federal data that does exist relies on voluntary, self-reported submissions from police departments. The FBI began tracking use-of-force incidents in its Uniform Crime Reporting system in 2019.

The Trump administration shut down the National Law Enforcement Accountability Database in 2025. Separately, the Fatal Force database, which tracked fatal police shootings between 2015 and 2024, stopped updating in 2025.

Campaign Zero's Mapping Police Violence database compiles incidents from public records, media reports and other verifiable sources. The database includes deaths involving other types of force as well as some accidental deaths, making its totals broader than counts limited to fatal shootings alone.