For the first time in years, there are early signs that police killings in the United States may be declining — after deaths reached a record high in 2024 and amid intensified scrutiny of law enforcement tactics nationwide.The findings come as photos and videos of aggressive law enforcement — particularly involving federal immigration agents — have dominated headlines and social media. The new numbers don’t include deaths during immigration enforcement, and federal agents operate under different authorities and standards than state and local police. Nevertheless, some experts say the heightened visibility has sharpened public attention on the use of force.New data from Campaign Zero, a research group that advocates for the end of police violence, shows a slight drop in police killings in 2025 compared with 2024.At least 1,314 people were killed by police in 2025 — the first annual decrease since 2019, according to the group’s report. By comparison, at least 1,383 people were killed by law enforcement in 2024, the highest number recorded since the group began tracking the data.Some policing experts caution that it’s too early to say whether the drop is the beginning of a longer-term decline.“You want to have a couple of good years, and you want to begin to gather why we think these things are happening,” said Tracie Keesee, co-founder of the Center for Policing Equity and an associate professor of public safety and justice at the University of Virginia School of Continuing and Professional Studies. Keesee has 25 years of law enforcement experience.“What do we not know?” she said. “What’s the data not telling us? I think that’s also important.”Experts point to a range of possible explanations for the decrease in police-related deaths, including ongoing staffing shortages that have resulted in fewer officers on patrol, expanded use of de-escalation training and stricter use-of-force policies, and the uneven rollout of changes adopted by police departments in the years following the 2020 police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.Lower crime rates nationwide — including a decline in homicides — is another possible factor, some experts say, as it may have reduced the number of high-risk encounters between police and civilians.The uncertainty reflects long-standing gaps in national policing data. There is no comprehensive federal government database tracking police use of force, leaving the public to rely on independent efforts such as Campaign Zero’s Mapping Police Violence database, which compiles incidents from public records, media reports and other verifiable sources.Last year, the Trump administration shut down the National Law Enforcement Accountability Database, a system that tracked misconduct by federal law enforcement officers.The available data that is maintained by the federal government is collected by the FBI through its Uniform Crime Reporting system, which began tracking use-of-force incidents in 2019. The data relies on voluntary, self-reported submissions from police departments.Another widely cited effort, The Washington Post’s Fatal Force database, tracked fatal police shootings between 2015 and 2024, but stopped updating the numbers in 2025.While the Fatal Force database focused solely on police shootings, the Mapping Police Violence database takes a broader approach, including deaths involving other types of force as well as some accidental deaths — differences that can shape overall counts and complicate comparisons.Researchers say these gaps are not just a data problem but also a barrier to understanding use of force itself. The gaps make it difficult to study when and why force is used and to evaluate which policies — whether legislative or within police departments — are the most effective in reducing it.“There really is a significant misconception about what use of force looks like, and it’s largely because of the fact that we just don’t know what leads to use-of-force incidents,” said Logan Kennedy, an assistant professor of criminal justice and criminology at East Carolina University. “There’s not data out there.”Variation across statesState-level data from Campaign Zero shows wide variation not only in how often police kill civilians, but also in the types of encounters that turn fatal.Some states consistently had far lower rates of police killings than others. Rhode Island was the only state that had no police killings in 2025, according to the report.New Jersey had the second-lowest rate in the country in 2025, with 0.08 police killings per 100,000 people. That’s a 48% decrease from the state’s average of the previous 12 years, according to the report.By contrast, New Mexico had the highest rate of police killings per capita, with 1.36 police killings per 100,000 people, according to the report.The types of incidents that lead to deadly force also vary.