Getting Away with Murder Obstacles to Police Accountability

Edited by Wornie Reed

Despite the national attention police violence gained and the calls for police reform following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, police officers are killing more people each year.1 Police killed at least 1,173 people in 2024.2 Although half of the people shot and killed by police are white, black Americans are shot at a disproportionate rate. Hispanic people are also killed at a disproportionate rate. One reason this assault on citizens continues is that very few roadblocks have been put in the way of excessive violent policing. While any policing reform is beneficial, many reforms being discussed and enacted are unlikely to significantly reduce police use of excessive force. Many critical issues in policing affect African American people. This book addresses several of them. The Black Lives Matter protests in the United States and around the world were primarily about the excessive use of force by police against African American people. This excessive use of force includes homicides. In the U.S., police kill black people at more than twice the rate they kill white people, and black people are 30 percent more likely than white people to be unarmed when killed.3 Of all the police killings documented between 2013 and 2019, one data source, Mapping Police Violence, found only 1 percent of cases led to a conviction of a police officer.4 Many members of the public andsome elected officials have argued that the excessive use of force by the police could be curtailed if more officers were held accountable for their actions, primarily their actions against innocent citizens. The authors of the papers in this series subscribe to that view and discuss some significant reasons why and how police are not held accountable for their excessive use of force. 

Blacksburg, VA, Virginia Tech Publishing, 2025. 98p.