The Los Angeles Police Division on Tuesday launched a report touting a decline in shootings by officers in 2024, whilst officers acknowledged this 12 months’s numbers present the development reversing with a serious uptick in incidents of lethal drive.
LAPD officers opened fireplace on 29 individuals final 12 months, in contrast with 34 in 2023 — an indication, the report’s authors maintained, that the division’s efforts to curb severe makes use of of drive are having an impact.
Already in 2025, nonetheless, LAPD officers have surpassed the whole variety of shootings recorded final 12 months, with police opening fireplace not less than 31 occasions in lower than 9 months.
Teresa Sánchez-Gordon, who on Tuesday was introduced because the Police Fee’s new president, mentioned she was struck by the truth that throughout encounters with individuals exhibiting indicators of psychological sickness final 12 months, officers generally shot as an alternative of first deploying weapons meant to incapacitate.
“Why can we not enhance that … use of that less-lethal means?” requested Sánchez-Gordon.
LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell instructed the fee that using Tasers and launchers that shoot laborious foam projectiles was “foremost on all people’s minds.”
However oftentimes, he mentioned, encounters with individuals in disaster unfold so rapidly and unpredictably that officers are left with little time to think about different instruments. He famous that the overwhelming majority of shootings stem from 911 calls, slightly than “proactive policing,” which he mentioned underscores “the reactive nature of those occasions.”
The timing of Tuesday’s report appeared incongruous amid mounting public anger over a current rise in police shootings, together with a continued sample of officers killing individuals who seem like within the midst of some behavioral disaster.
The report additionally famous a rising variety of shootings final 12 months through which officers mistakenly consider somebody is armed, an more and more frequent situation that has additionally been trigger for current concern.
In July, LAPD officers fatally shot a person sitting inside a utility van on the town’s Eastside after, they mentioned, he ignored repeated instructions to drop what turned out to be a toy Airsoft gun, which resembled an actual rifle. The lifeless man’s fiancee mentioned he had handled psychological well being points up to now.
In current weeks, the fee has pushed McDonnell to do extra to curb the variety of shootings.
Final 12 months, the Southeast, North Hollywood and Harbor patrol areas noticed the most important jumps within the variety of police shootings, whereas 77th Avenue, Foothill, Rampart and Newton divisions recorded the most important decreases.
The shootings minimize throughout racial strains. Roughly 55% of these shot by officers have been Latino, with Black and white individuals every accounting for round 21% of the incidents, with the remaining 3% involving Asians.
Greater than half of the officers who fired their weapons have been Latino, which is roughly in keeping with the division’s racial make-up. 1 / 4 of the officers have been white, with Asian officers liable for 11% of the shootings.
From 2023 to 2024, the variety of officers injured in shootings rose from eight to 11, in accordance with the report.
The rise in police shootings has been an everyday level of rivalry for the police critics and social justice advocates who present as much as communicate on the fee’s weekly conferences.
On Tuesday, Melina Abdullah, a distinguished civil rights chief who has lengthy been vital of the division’s historical past of extreme drive towards communities of coloration, accused the fee of failing to take critically its position as police shootings proceed to rise.
“I don’t know the way this oversight physique just isn’t overseeing and demanding one thing completely different,” she mentioned.
The current report discovered that officers fired almost twice as many bullets final 12 months as they did in 2020. On common, LAPD officers fired greater than 10 rounds per capturing.
Along with the decline in police shootings final 12 months, the division’s report revealed that so-called non-categorical makes use of of drive — LAPD communicate for the deployment of a Taser or beanbag shotgun or incidents that lead to severe however non-life-threatening accidents — dipped barely to 1,451 from 1,503.
The decline got here amid a drop in each crime and the quantity of people that got here into contact with the LAPD in 2024.
There was additionally a big decline in shootings of individuals with knives, swords and different edged weapons. Stopping these varieties of confrontations from turning lethal has been some extent of emphasis by the division and the fee lately. In February, LAPD officers confronted criticism after they shot and killed a transgender girl holding a knife at a Pacoima motel room after she known as 911 to report that she had been kidnapped.
Very similar to with most crime statistics, consultants warning towards studying an excessive amount of into year-over-year fluctuations. However division statistics present that regardless of the current uptick, police shootings are nonetheless down appreciable from their highs within the early Nineties and make up solely a small fraction of all public encounters yearly.
