How place and race drive the numbers of fatal police shootings in the US: 2015–2020

Place and race are two important predictors of fatal police shootings. We used Mapping Police Violence Data and the Washington Post Fatal Force Data to determine whether a county's deprivation status within communities influences the association between the number of fatal police shootings, and how the number of fatal police shootings differs by race and ethnicity. We categorized counties based on the Social Vulnerability Index (SVI) to three categories: low-, medium-, and high-SVI. The analytical sample included 3136 US counties between 2015 and 2020; during this time, 5525 individuals were fatally shot by police.