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README.md
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license: cc-by-4.0
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---
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---
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license: cc-by-4.0
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language:
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- en
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tags:
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- police
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- criminal-justice
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- open-data
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- united-kingdom
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- united-states
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- australia
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pretty_name: Police accountability data (UK, US, Australia)
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size_categories:
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- n<1K
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---
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# Police accountability data: United Kingdom, United States and Australia
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Nine derived, machine-readable tables on police complaints, stop and search, and deaths following
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police contact. 728 rows. Every figure is computed from official open data by code and published
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with its source, its period and its denominator attached. **No figure was written, estimated or
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rounded by a language model.**
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- **Documentation and downloads:** https://www.policecomplaint.com/data/
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- **Column reference (data dictionary):** https://police-accountability-data.readthedocs.io/
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- **Usage handbook, which calculations are wrong:** https://copious-co.gitbook.io/copious.co-docs
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- **Source repository:** https://github.com/copious-git/police-accountability-data
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- **Cite the concept DOI:** https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22165476
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## Read this before you use it
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- **A disparity ratio is a measured difference in outcomes.** It is not proof that anyone acted
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unlawfully and it does not establish a cause.
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- **A recorded complaint is an allegation, not a finding.** A force that records complaints readily
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logs more of them.
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- **The UK ethnicity figures use two different bases.** Searches carry *officer-defined* ethnicity;
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Census denominators are *self-defined*. People recorded as Mixed are 0.5% of searches against
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2.9% of residents, a gap too large to be real. Treat the direction as solid and the magnitude as
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uncertain.
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- **Every rate ships with its own numerator and denominator.** Dividing by the row total instead
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understates the rate on 21 of 41 forces, by up to 24.5 percentage points.
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## Contents
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| File | Rows | One row is |
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|---|---|---|
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| `uk/stop-and-search-outcomes-by-force.csv` | 44 | one police force |
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| `uk/stop-search-ethnic-disparity-by-force.csv` | 205 | one force, one ethnic group |
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| `uk/stop-search-ethnic-disparity-national.csv` | 5 | one ethnic group, England and Wales |
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| `uk/complaint-review-outcomes-by-force.csv` | 44 | one force |
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| `uk/deaths-following-police-contact-by-year.csv` | 21 | one financial year |
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| `uk/deaths-following-police-contact-by-category.csv` | 6 | one IOPC category, plus a TOTAL row |
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| `us/police-killings-by-state.csv` | 51 | one state, including DC |
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| `us/police-killings-by-agency.csv` | 208 | one department |
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| `australia/complaints-and-deaths-in-custody-by-state.csv` | 144 | one state, one year |
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## Headline figures
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**United Kingdom.** 1,397,874 recorded stop and searches across 41 of 44 forces. Nationally, Black
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people accounted for 18.2% of searches with a recorded ethnicity against 4.0% of residents, a ratio
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of 4.5, over 1,151,285 searches in 36 publishable forces. 24.5% of completed complaint reviews found
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the force's own handling was not reasonable and proportionate. 3,666 deaths during or following
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police contact, 2004/05 to 2024/25.
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**United States.** 15,550 people killed by police 2013 to 2026. 267 cases (1.7%) led to a charge,
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91 to a conviction or guilty plea, 40 to an acquittal.
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**Australia.** Complaints per 100,000 people in 2024-25 ranged from 6.3 in Victoria to 97.6 in the
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Northern Territory. 445 deaths in police custody, 93 of a person recorded as Aboriginal or Torres
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Strait Islander.
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## Coverage gaps, which are real
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Greater Manchester, Gwent and British Transport Police publish no stop-and-search data at all.
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Five further forces record ethnicity on too few searches to support a ratio and are marked
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`publishable=false` with the reason. Scotland and Northern Ireland are absent because Police
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Scotland and the PSNI do not report into these datasets. Ireland has no dataset: we checked all
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12,985 Central Statistics Office tables.
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## Sources and licences
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data.police.uk, the Independent Office for Police Conduct, the Home Office and the Office for
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National Statistics under the Open Government Licence v3.0; the Productivity Commission's Report on
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Government Services 2026 under CC BY 4.0; Mapping Police Violence under the publisher's own terms;
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US Census Bureau population estimates in the public domain. Only aggregates are redistributed; no
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source's record-level data is republished.
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## Who publishes this
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Copious Ltd (England and Wales, company no. 11437826), which publishes
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[PoliceComplaint.com](https://www.policecomplaint.com/) and also operates a claims referral service.
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The data is published openly under CC BY 4.0 regardless.
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