2024 calendars
coming soon

About the 2024 Calendar

We enter our 10th year of this project. Each year the calendar has a different theme for some of the days that do not mark killings of Black citizens by police. This year those days focus on the accomplishments of high achieving young Black people in arts, science and education.

The calendar marks homicides from January 1, 2020–October 31, 2023. Older homicides are left off to accommodate more recent deaths. Every year the police kill more than 1,000 citizens of whom a range of 26% (in 2018) to 29% (in 2019) have been African American. Comparative data for 2023 are not complete as of this writing but so far about 22% of those killed are Black. Black Americans make up about 14% of the U.S. population, a figure that includes multi-racial Black Americans. All research sites I have seen agree that Black Americans are grossly overrepresented among those killed by police. According to statistics published on mappingpoliceviolence.org, across the nation not only are Black people more likely to be killed by police, they are more likely to be unarmed and less likely to be threatening someone when killed.

Some cities present higher risks for Black citizens. In Chicago, Black people are killed at a rate 25 times higher than whites, while in Minneapolis and Boston the figure is
28 times higher than others. You can read about your state or city, learn which states will and won’t report offending officers’ names, see the positive effect of electing Black district attorneys on prosecution of criminal police, and examine other patterns in the data by doing a deep dive into the mappingpoliceviolence.org website and their subsidiary policeviolencereport.org.