Phoenix police shootings fall below average this year, but not to a decade low

So far, 2026 has been a lighter year than usual for shootings involving Phoenix police officers. It has not been the lightest.

From Jan. 1 through Oct. 17, the department recorded 13 officer-involved shooting incidents, according to the Phoenix Police Department's newly updated shooting data. That is 29.9% below the average of 18.6 incidents for the same dates from 2017 through 2025.

The drop from last year is smaller. By Oct. 17, 2025, Phoenix officers had been involved in 15 shooting incidents, so this year's count is down 13.3%. Set against 2017, when the same window held 16 incidents, 2026 is 18.8% lower.

Below average, but not a record low

Line up every year's Jan. 1 to Oct. 17 count, and 2026 lands seventh out of 10, counting from the most incidents to the fewest.

The comparison also says something about the years in between. The average for 2017 through 2025 sits above both the 2017 and 2025 counts for the same window, which means some of the years between them ran higher before the numbers came back down.

What a full year looks like

Whole-year totals follow the same general slide. Phoenix recorded 21 officer-involved shooting incidents in all of 2017 and 17 in 2025, a decline of 19%.

The last weeks of the year have mattered. In 2017, the count went from 16 on Oct. 17 to 21 by Dec. 31. In 2025, it grew from 15 to 17.

This year's tally through mid-October is already close to the 15 the department logged for the whole of 2019.

For residents trying to judge how often city officers fire their weapons, that is the honest frame: 2026 has been quieter than most recent years, in a city whose yearly counts are small enough that a few incidents can reshape the picture.

When agencies share a scene

Not every shooting with Phoenix officers present involves Phoenix officers alone. On Friday, Feb. 27, 2026, Arizona Department of Public Safety troopers and Phoenix police officers were involved in an officer-involved shooting (Department of Public Safety). Officers fired and struck a man named Flores, who was pronounced dead at the scene (Department of Public Safety).

The state agency's Major Incident Division is investigating that case (Department of Public Safety). In a count this small, how a single joint incident is tallied can move the year-to-year comparison noticeably.

The year's final count won't be known until after Dec. 31.

About the data

We used the Phoenix Police Department's officer-involved shooting dataset, updated in October 2026, and counted incidents by year from 2017 through Oct. 17, 2026. To compare a partial year fairly, we counted incidents from Jan. 1 through Oct. 17 in each year from 2017 to 2026, averaged the 2017–2025 windows and ranked every year in that span; we also report full-year totals for completed years.

• The 2026 figure covers only Jan. 1 through Oct. 17, so it is not comparable to full-year totals and will likely change before year's end.
• The dataset counts incidents, not the number of officers who fired or people struck, and does not explain why counts rise or fall.
• It is not clear from the data how shootings involving both Phoenix officers and other agencies, such as the Arizona Department of Public Safety, are counted.

Officer-involved shooting incident: an event logged in the Phoenix Police Department's officer-involved shooting dataset.

Sources

• The publisher's CKAN open-data portal (named with each dataset): Officer Involved Shooting (OIS) — OIS Incident Summary, latest period 2026-10-17, released Oct. 17, 2026; retrieved Oct. 18, 2026. Data
• The publisher's CKAN open-data portal (named with each dataset): Officer Involved Shooting (OIS) — OIS Race Ethnicity Summary, latest period 2026-10-17, released Oct. 17, 2026; retrieved Oct. 18, 2026. Data