Datasets:

copious-git
/

police-accountability-data

license: cc-by-4.0
language:
  - en
tags:
  - police
  - criminal-justice
  - open-data
  - united-kingdom
  - united-states
  - australia
pretty_name: Police accountability data (UK, US, Australia)
size_categories:
  - n<1K

Police accountability data: United Kingdom, United States and Australia

Nine derived, machine-readable tables on police complaints, stop and search, and deaths following police contact. 728 rows. Every figure is computed from official open data by code and published with its source, its period and its denominator attached. No figure was written, estimated or rounded by a language model.

Documentation and downloads: https://www.policecomplaint.com/data/
Column reference (data dictionary): https://police-accountability-data.readthedocs.io/
Usage handbook, which calculations are wrong: https://copious-co.gitbook.io/copious.co-docs
Source repository: https://github.com/copious-git/police-accountability-data
Cite the concept DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22165476

Read this before you use it

A disparity ratio is a measured difference in outcomes. It is not proof that anyone acted unlawfully and it does not establish a cause.
A recorded complaint is an allegation, not a finding. A force that records complaints readily logs more of them.
The UK ethnicity figures use two different bases. Searches carry officer-defined ethnicity; Census denominators are self-defined. People recorded as Mixed are 0.5% of searches against 2.9% of residents, a gap too large to be real. Treat the direction as solid and the magnitude as uncertain.
Every rate ships with its own numerator and denominator. Dividing by the row total instead understates the rate on 21 of 41 forces, by up to 24.5 percentage points.

Each file has a rendered, human-readable counterpart. If you want to check a figure by eye before using the CSV, or cite a page rather than a file, use the third column.

File	Rows	One row is	Rendered as
`uk/stop-and-search-outcomes-by-force.csv`	44	one police force	Every UK force, ranked
`uk/stop-search-ethnic-disparity-by-force.csv`	205	one force, one ethnic group	Who gets stopped and searched
`uk/stop-search-ethnic-disparity-national.csv`	5	one ethnic group, England and Wales	Who gets stopped and searched
`uk/complaint-review-outcomes-by-force.csv`	44	one force	Every UK force, ranked
`uk/deaths-following-police-contact-by-year.csv`	21	one financial year	Deaths during or following police contact
`uk/deaths-following-police-contact-by-category.csv`	6	one IOPC category, plus a TOTAL row	Deaths during or following police contact
`us/police-killings-by-state.csv`	51	one state, including DC	People killed by police, by US state
`us/police-killings-by-agency.csv`	208	one department	US departments, ranked
`australia/complaints-and-deaths-in-custody-by-state.csv`	144	one state, one year	Australia, by state and territory

To put two UK forces side by side on the same measures without writing any code, there is a force comparison tool.

Headline figures

United Kingdom. 1,397,874 recorded stop and searches across 41 of 44 forces. Nationally, Black people accounted for 18.2% of searches with a recorded ethnicity against 4.0% of residents, a ratio of 4.5, over 1,151,285 searches in 36 publishable forces. 24.5% of completed complaint reviews found the force's own handling was not reasonable and proportionate. 3,666 deaths during or following police contact, 2004/05 to 2024/25.

United States. 15,550 people killed by police 2013 to 2026. 267 cases (1.7%) led to a charge, 91 to a conviction or guilty plea, 40 to an acquittal.

Australia. Complaints per 100,000 people in 2024-25 ranged from 6.3 in Victoria to 97.6 in the Northern Territory. 445 deaths in police custody, 93 of a person recorded as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander.

Coverage gaps, which are real

Greater Manchester, Gwent and British Transport Police publish no stop-and-search data at all. Five further forces record ethnicity on too few searches to support a ratio and are marked publishable=false with the reason. Scotland and Northern Ireland are absent because Police Scotland and the PSNI do not report into these datasets. Ireland has no dataset: we checked all 12,985 Central Statistics Office tables.

Sources and licences

data.police.uk, the Independent Office for Police Conduct, the Home Office and the Office for National Statistics under the Open Government Licence v3.0; the Productivity Commission's Report on Government Services 2026 under CC BY 4.0; Mapping Police Violence under the publisher's own terms; US Census Bureau population estimates in the public domain. Only aggregates are redistributed; no source's record-level data is republished.

Who publishes this

Copious Ltd (England and Wales, company no. 11437826), which publishes PoliceComplaint.com and also operates a claims referral service. The data is published openly under CC BY 4.0 regardless.

Journalists and researchers. Figures, methodology notes and a named contact are on the press page. If a number here looks wrong, say so and it will be corrected in public with the correction recorded, as two already have been.