Fact-Checking a Police-Shooting Database
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According to Fatal Force, the Washington Post’s police-shooting database, Virgil J. Wolford, Jr. of Columbus, Ohio, was killed by police on April 30, 2018. Except he wasn’t. Wolford, Jr. was, in fact, non-fatally shot by the Columbus police after stabbing a woman and pointing a shotgun at officers. In 2019, he received a three-year prison sentence (which he appealed, and lost, in 2020). He died in his home in April 2023.Any police use of force, especially deadly force, is a grave matter. But the reason that videos of police shootings tend to go viral is that they are quite rare—and the unjustified or even questionable use of deadly force is rarer still. Our calculations—based on the annual average of police–public contacts from the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ Police Public Contact Survey in 2015, 2018, and 2020, and on the annual fatal shooting counts of the Post database—show that police use force of any type in less thanone-tenth of 1 percent of all 911 calls. Less than 0.002 perce...