The Texas Tribune’s Unholstered project presents the results of a nearly yearlong investigation into when and why officers used lethal force in Texas, examining shootings that occurred between 2010 and 2015.
We focused on police departments in cities with a population of 100,000 or more at the time we began gathering data, totaling 36 cities that make up about half of Texas’ population.
We chose the 100,000 population threshold because shootings per department in smaller cities are sporadic and difficult to track. Even in some of the larger cities we studied, departments said they lacked the ability to keep records on police shootings.
We used public records laws to obtain lists of shootings and incident reports from each department. We independently confirmed some details through news articles and other legal documents.
In addition to reviewing hundreds of incident reports, we interviewed relatives of people shot by officers. We spoke with police departments to learn more about their policies, training and de-escalation strategies.
And we obtained demographic data on the officers and people involved in the shootings. Click on the button below to download our full dataset.
Planning to download our data? We’d love to hear how you’re using it. Email us at unholstered@texastribune.org.
The cities we examined are:
- Houston
- San Antonio
- Dallas
- Austin
- Fort Worth
- El Paso
- Arlington
- Corpus Christi
- Plano
- Laredo
- Lubbock
- Garland
- Irving
- Amarillo
- Grand Prairie
- Brownsville
- Pasadena
- McKinney
- Mesquite
- Killeen
- Frisco
- McAllen
- Waco
- Carrollton
- Midland
- Denton
- Abilene
- Beaumont
- Odessa
- Round Rock
- Wichita Falls
- Richardson
- Lewisville
- Tyler
- Pearland
- College Station
Data gathering and reporting was done by Alexa Ura, Johnathan Silver and Jolie McCullough. McCullough analyzed the data. Justin Dehn produced all the video segments for this project.
This site was designed by Ben Hasson and Emily Albracht, and produced by McCullough and Ryan Murphy. Our findings piece and visuals were produced by Murphy, and Hasson and Albracht created the illustrations throughout the project. Todd Wiseman was our photo editor.
Jacob Villanueva oversaw art direction.
This project was funded by Tribune supporters. View the list of donors here.
Correction
An error in our data listed an officer and person’s names who were tied to a shooting we had previously determined was not an officer-involved shooting. Because of this, the number of officers and people involved in shootings in our main findings have each decreased by one. There were 880 officers who fired their weapons at 737 people.