Police Use of Lethal Force

The Cline Center’s SPOTLITE project generates trustworthy data about police uses of lethal force across the United States. It aims to promote a more informed public dialogue about policing practices that helps rebuild trust between communities and the officers who serve them. The SPOTLITE project includes any incident where police use firearms—including those with non-fatal outcomes—as well as any other use of force by police that results in a death.

SPOTLITE’s incident count data currently includes all known uses of lethal force by police nationwide from 2014 through 2023. SPOTLITE’s race and sex breakdown data currently includes the ascribed race and sex characteristics of all identifiable civilians involved in these incidents from 2022 and 2023.

SPOTLITE is a continually evolving work in progress. To get this data into the hands of American communities as quickly as possible, we release each new data feature as soon as it is completed, rather than waiting until all planned elements are in place. The SPOTLITE team is already working on updating the incident count dashboard to the present so that this resource can provide nearly real-time monitoring capability. Additional planned enhancements include an anomaly detector for identifying counties with higher or lower numbers of SPOTLITE incidents than would be expected from nationwide trends, specifying precise incident locations, identifying involved agencies, and documenting whether any civilians or officers were injured or killed in an incident.

The SPOTLITE project is nonpartisan and nonadvocacy. It was developed to move public attention away from occasional viral videos of lethal force events and onto a more solid grounding of facts about what is happening nationwide. SPOTLITE gives Americans a way to see the full population of lethal force incidents involving police, something that no other current data resource can do. 

SPOTLITE data aims to help journalists, researchers, and the public ask better questions about policing practices nationwide: Where are these incidents happening? Who is affected? What are the trends over time? SPOTLITE data also aims to help law enforcement agencies better understand the situational factors where an officer experiences the need to use deadly force so we can reduce inappropriate uses of lethal force, develop better use-of-force policies, enhance the effectiveness of training opportunities for officers, and improve the safety of both civilians and officers involved in these incidents.