LAPD touts 2024 police shootings dip; officers firing more this year
The Los Angeles Police Department on Tuesday released a report touting a decline in shootings by officers in 2024, even as officials acknowledged this year’s numbers show the trend reversing with a major uptick in incidents of deadly force.
LAPD officers opened fire on 29 people last year, compared with 34 in 2023 — a sign, the report’s authors maintained, that the department’s efforts to curb serious uses of force are having an effect.
Already in 2025, however, LAPD officers have surpassed the total number of shootings recorded last year, with police opening fire at least 31 times in less than nine months.
Teresa Sánchez-Gordon, who on Tuesday was announced as the Police Commission’s new president, said she was struck by the fact that during encounters with people exhibiting signs of mental illness last year, officers sometimes shot instead of first deploying weapons meant to incapacitate.
“Why can we not increase that … use of that less-lethal means?” asked Sánchez-Gordon.
LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell told the commission that the use of Tasers and launchers that shoot hard foam projectiles was “foremost on everybody’s minds.”
But oftentimes, he said, encounters with people in crisis unfold so quickly and unpredictably that officers are left with little time to consider other tools. He noted that the vast majority of shootings stem from 911 calls, rather than “proactive policing,” which he said underscores “the reactive nature of these events.”
The timing of Tuesday’s report seemed incongruous amid mounting public anger over a recent rise in police shootings, including a continued pattern of officers killing people who appear to be in the midst of some behavioral crisis.
The report also noted a rising number of shootings last year in which officers mistakenly believe someone is armed, an increasingly common scenario that has also been cause for recent concern.
In July, LAPD officers fatally shot a man sitting inside a utility van on the city’s Eastside after, they said, he ignored repeated commands to drop what turned out to be a toy Airsoft gun, which resembled a real rifle. The dead man’s fiancee said he had dealt with mental health issues in the past.
In recent weeks, the commission has pushed McDonnell to do more to curb the number of shootings.
Last year, the Southeast, North Hollywood and Harbor patrol areas saw the biggest jumps in the number of police shootings, while 77th Street, Foothill, Rampart and Newton divisions recorded the biggest decreases.
The shootings cut across racial lines. Roughly 55% of those shot by officers were Latino, with Black and white people each accounting for around 21% of the incidents, with the remaining 3% involving Asians.
More than half of the officers who fired their weapons were Latino, which is roughly in line with the department’s racial makeup. A quarter of the officers were white, with Asian officers responsible for 11% of the shootings.
From 2023 to 2024, the number of officers injured in shootings rose from eight to 11, according to the report.
The rise in police shootings has been a regular point of contention for the police critics and social justice advocates who show up to speak at the commission’s weekly meetings.
On Tuesday, Melina Abdullah, a prominent civil rights leader who has long been critical of the department’s history of excessive force against communities of color, accused the commission of failing to take seriously its role as police shootings continue to rise.
“I don’t know how this oversight body is not overseeing and demanding something different,” she said.
The recent report found that officers fired nearly twice as many bullets last year as they did in 2020. On average, LAPD officers fired more than 10 rounds per shooting.
In addition to the decline in police shootings last year, the department’s report revealed that so-called non-categorical uses of force — LAPD speak for the deployment of a Taser or beanbag shotgun or incidents that result in serious but non-life-threatening injuries — dipped slightly to 1,451 from 1,503.
The decline came amid a drop in both crime and the number of people who came into contact with the LAPD in 2024.
There was also a significant decline in shootings of people with knives, swords and other edged weapons. Preventing those types of confrontations from turning deadly has been a point of emphasis by the department and the commission in recent years. In February, LAPD officers faced criticism after they shot and killed a transgender woman holding a knife at a Pacoima motel room after she called 911 to report that she had been kidnapped.
Much like with most crime statistics, experts caution against reading too much into year-over-year fluctuations. But department statistics show that despite the recent uptick, police shootings are still down considerable from their highs in the early 1990s and make up only a small fraction of all public encounters every year.
