The number of shootings by Los Angeles police officers spiked by more than 50% last year, according to the department’s 2015 use of force report.

Forty-eight people were shot by officers in 2015, up from 30 in 2014, according to the Los Angeles police department (LAPD) report, which was released on Tuesday. Twenty-one of those shot died from their injuries, up from 18 the year before.

By comparison, in New York – a city more than twice the size of Los Angeles, with four times the number of police officers – police shot 34 people, eight of whom died.

The LAPD report also showed that black people were five times more likely to be shot by police than white people and 2.6 times more likely than Latinos, once adjusted for relative populations.



Twenty-three of the 48 people shot in 2015 by Los Angeles officers were Latino, 12 were black, and seven were white, in a city where the population is almost 50% Hispanic, 30% non-Hispanic white, and less than 10% black.

The number of people shot who had indications of mental illness also rose sharply in real terms from the year before, almost tripling, from five to 14 – representing 37% of the total number shot, up from 19% in 2014.



Black people were also stopped by police 160,412 times, making them four times more likely to be stopped than white people. In a city where the black population is just under 400,000, according to the latest US census bureau data, that means that in 2015 there were a little fewer than one traffic stop for every two black people.

Peter Bibring, the director of police practices for the American Civil Liberties Union of southern California, said that the number of shootings was “simply staggering”.

“Those are lives lost,” Bibring said. “And lives that the department have sworn to protect and serve as much as any other. Obviously there may be circumstances where use of force may be more justified than others, but at least in one breakdown it suggests that there were seven instances where either the suspect was unarmed or the officers perceived a weapon which wasn’t actually drawn at the time. Those seem to be avoidable, if not an outright mistake.”

The report also showed that LAPD officers were considerably more likely to be wounded in 2015 than the year before; the number of officers wounded in the line of duty was up 64%, from five instances in 2014 to 14 instances in 2015.

In a statement, LAPD chief Charlie Beck said that the report “represents the LAPD’s steadfast commitment to providing detailed information on the department’s uses of force”.

“This unprecedented analysis and amount of information will help the LAPD continuously improve our efforts to preserve life and protect the community,” the statement continued.

Bibring said the racial disparity shown in the report was not surprising. “The LAPD has been collecting and publishing data on who they stop since 2002,” he said, “and it has always shown an extraordinarily disproportionate burden on African Americans in terms of who [police] stop, who gets pulled out of cars.”

“But one of the things I think this highlights is that those concerns about racial disparities in who gets stopped and who gets searched aren’t just about the inconvenience and indignity of those searches,” he continued. “They are about real risk of violence that go along with increased contact with police.”

Tim Williams, a retired detective supervisor with 29 years of experience in the LAPD, said that he saw in the report a “training issue” that the force needs to address. But he pointed to a pilot program that began in February that encourages the use of non-lethal force. “We’ll have to see how that … impacts [next year’s] statistics,” he said.