On November 15, Rajan Moonesinghe was shot and killed by an Austin Police officer while he stood on the front porch of his South Austin home. Rajan was a technology entrepreneur and the co-founder of InKind. He was 33 years old. 

I read about the killing this morning in an article by the Wall Street Journal. The article discussed Moonesinghe's killing in the context of Austin's growth and its continued struggle with police violence. Three specific claims were:

1. Austin police have killed at least 20 people since 2017.

2. Austin has the ninth-highest per capita rate of police killings among the country's 25 largest cities.

3. Austin had the highest per capita rate of police shootings in response to mental health crises among the country's 15 largest cities (citing a 2019 University of Texas report).

I was interested in this story and, as an Austin resident, decided to dig deeper into the statistics that they mentioned. I had filed a request through the Austin Police Department's website to obtain records of their police shootings back in August. They never responded. But fortunately, the Washington Post recently released a large dataset on police shootings. Their data team compiled nationwide statistics and maintains the dataset on Github. I used this dataset, as well as U.S. census data, to fact check the Journal's claims and see if Austin is truly unique in its struggle with police violence.

Austin police have killed at least 20 people since December 2017.

The first statistic the Journal article mentioned is that the city's police have killed at least 20 people in the past five years. This is mostly true, if slightly misleading.  The Austin Police Department killed 18 people during that timeframe. The two remaining shooting victims that the Journal appears to count were killed in Austin by Pflugerville and Leander police officers. The two towns are suburbs of Austin.

The Post data goes back to 2015 and counts a total of 36 shooting victims in Austin (34 killings by the Austin Police Department).  Besides a concentration of killings downtown, there is no immediately discernible geographic pattern.

The rate of police killings appears constant excluding a slowdown in killings from 2020-22 (see below). That slowdown could have been caused by the pandemic lowering crime rates and keeping people indoors. It could also be a result of the city's policy response to the protests that followed the death of Michael Ramos (locally) and George Floyd (nationally). Those protests were a big deal in Austin (see top picture) and caused the city to cut police funding. It later backtracked on those cuts. But it's possible that those factors together influenced individual police behavior to decrease shootings.

In any case, shootings seem to have become more frequent since then. Seven people have been killed by police in Austin this year.

Austin experiences police-related killings at a higher rate than comparable cities.

The Wall Street Journal's second claim is that Austin ranks ninth among the 25 largest cities when comparing per capita rates of police killings since December 2017. Again, this may be true depending on how you count it. I used US Census data with populations from 2020. Adjusting by that estimate put Austin in 11th place among the country's 25 largest cities, between LA and El Paso. Expanding to 2015 per the rest of the Post's data, Austin ranked 10th.

It certainly doesn't seem to be an outlier. While it does appear to be slightly above the trend, Austin is not in a unique position among American cities. New York, shown below in red, is the largest outlier; I dropped it from the regression. The distribution is heteroskedastic but illustrative.

Police killings in Austin often involve mental health incidents.

Overall, great data from the Washington Post. Solid reporting from the Wall Street Journal. Police violence, even if justified, should be avoided at all costs. Reporting, data sharing, and continued conversation are all important contributions to that goal.