LAPD officers shot fewer people in 2022, but the percentage that turned deadly increased

Los Angeles police officers shot fewer people in 2022 than the year before, although a larger percentage of those encounters turned deadly, according to preliminary data released by the Los Angeles Police Department.

Police opened fire on civilians 31 times last year, striking 23 people; of those, 14 people were killed, according to a draft copy of the LAPD’s annual use-of-force report posted to the department’s website last week.

The number of overall shootings declined from 2021. That year, officers fired 37 times, striking 31 people and killing 17. But it was up from 2019, when police shootings reached a 30-year low.

LAPD officials trumpet the declines as proof the department is moving beyond the aggressive, confrontational style of policing it had long been known for. They have argued that, while force incidents garner a lot of attention from the news and on social media, they accounted for only a small fraction of the 1.1 million documented contacts officers had with the public last year.

The LAPD’s Critical Incident Review Division, which produced the report, did not respond to several requests for comment.

While expressing cautious optimism about the report’s findings, some longtime department observers point out that LAPD officers shoot more people than in other places and are still far too quick to resort to violence in certain situations.

Such sentiments surfaced after three people died at the hands of LAPD officers within a few days of each other at the start of the new year. Among them was Keenan Anderson, the distant cousin of Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors, who died several hours after an officer stunned him repeatedly with a Taser. LAPD officers also fatally shot two people in separate incidents in South L.A.

The deaths fueled opposition to LAPD Chief Michel Moore’s bid for a second term as the city’s top cop, with his critics arguing that under Moore the department has not done enough to root out a culture of aggression among officers. Moore was reappointed, but has said he will serve for only two or three years of a five-year term before stepping aside for a successor.

Anderson’s death in particular reignited calls that followed the 2020 murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis for less police funding and more investment in non-police alternatives to certain emergencies — something that a growing number of Angelenos want, according to a recent Suffolk University/Los Angeles Times poll.

LAPD data show that 35% of the people shot at in 2022 were showing obvious signs of mental distress, a 6% decrease from 2021. Nearly a fourth of police shootings involved someone experiencing homelessness, also down 4% from the previous year, the data show.

The report said 42% of people who were shot at were unarmed; 26% armed with weapons or other firearms and 16% were carrying an edged weapon, compared to 38% in 2021.

Police critics said the fact that so many of the recent cases involved suspects who appeared to be in the midst of a crisis was alarming and showed the need for alternatives to police responses to such calls.

The 31 on-duty shootings were the second-highest total of other big city departments cited in the report for comparison, trailing only the New York Police Department. The nation’s largest municipal police force — more than three times the size of the LAPD — had 40 shootings in 2022, according to the report. Police in Houston, Philadelphia and Chicago were involved in 29, 29, and 28 shootings, respectively.

The Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, an agency that’s similar in size to the LAPD but is responsible for patrolling a much larger geographical area, had 27 shootings, the report found.

Of that group of cities, Los Angeles police recorded the second-largest decline in overall shootings, with six fewer cases in 2022 than 2021 — a 16% decrease. By comparison, Philadelphia police shootings more than tripled in that span, from eight to 29.

But LAPD officers also killed more people, 14, than any of those other agencies, the report found; its shootings were more likely to end in a fatality, with 45% causing someone to lose their life, also outpacing the others.

Craig Miller, a retired 38-year law enforcement veteran, said there’s no easy explanation for why the number of police shootings fluctuates from one year to another. More likely, he added, it’s due a combination of factors unrelated to officers’ behavior, from improved reporting of such incidents to access to mental health services to unseasonable weather that keeps people indoors to the release of violent offenders from prison.

“Has there been an uptick in the number of people who’re released [from custody] in Los Angeles over one year to a previous year?” he asked, noting that such a jump could lead to more potentially dangerous encounters with officers.

Miller, a trial consultant who adjudicated about 75 police shootings over five years as a deputy police chief in Dallas, said officers today receive far better training for avoiding force, unless necessary.

“I really believe that the training that officers get today is so much better than years gone by, there’s more real-life scenario based training,” he said.

The LAPD report blamed the increased rate of fatal police shootings in part on the seemingly bottomless supply of weapons on city streets, particularly the availability of so-called “ghost guns.” In 18 of the department’s 2022 shootings, police fired after encountering someone with a firearm, up from 15 such instances in 2021. In seven of those cases, officers were fired at by suspects.

One such encounter happened last January when Officer Fernando Arroyos was killed while off duty after exchanging gunfire with a group of would-be robbers. Authorities later charged four people in his death; they tried to stick up Arroyos and his girlfriend while the couple was house hunting in January 2022. The officer was killed as he tried to defend himself and his girlfriend.

One of the four defendants pleaded guilty last week to their involvement in Arroyos’ killing.

The reduction in shootings is proof the department can make progress in lowering the number of times officers injure or kill civilians on the job, the report’s authors said. They pointed to newer training that teaches cops to take a more even-keeled approach with people in crisis and to disengage when needed.

New officers are also honing their skills in virtual reality scenarios, which allows them to get accustomed to defusing high-stress situations they might someday encounter in the field, all without firing a shot in real life.

But where some saw the numbers as a glimmer of optimism that officers were becoming less aggressive, others felt it distracted from a stark truth: that far too many police encounters still end in needless tragedy.

Pastor Cue Jn-Marie of The Church Without Walls said police culture is still rooted in fear and a need for control.

“If I come into a situation and my main focus is to get home to my family, then I’m not [going to] take the time to evaluate a situation,” said Jn-Marie, a longtime advocate of victims of police violence on skid row and elsewhere. “If they’re trained to perceive the situation as something that’s threatening to them, they’re not going to wait to evaluate a situation: they’re just going to kill somebody.”

In recent years, the department faced criticism for how often its officers shot people with mental health issues who were holding weapons such as knives. While the number of those shootings declined in 2022, Jn-Marie said the department still isn’t doing enough to prevent deadly outcomes or hold officers accountable for their use of force.

Officers fired a total of 216 rounds last year, 41 more than the year before and the highest number since 2018, the report found. In 2022, there were 17 incidents in which officers fired between 1 and 5 rounds, or just over half of the 31 total shootings.

Latinos were disproportionately represented among those shot at by police. Even though they make up just over half of the city’s overall population, they represented 65% of the people shot at by police. That share, which remained unchanged from 2021, also far outpaced the percentage of Latinos who were suspects of violent crime, 39%, according to department data.

Of the 56 officers who fired their weapons, the majority, 64%, were Latino. They were also overwhelmingly male — only one woman was involved in a shooting — and tended to be on the younger side, with nearly half of the officers involved having less than five years on the job. Most officers worked in patrol, although the number of cops from specialized units who shot at someone went up from 3 to 13.

Fifteen were officers who came from one police division, Newton, last year, or 27%.