You’re more likely to be shot by a cop in some parts of Phoenix than others.
Phoenix New Times mapped all documented shootings by Phoenix police officers from 2019 to the present using, data from the police department and the county attorney’s office. The map is color-coded by year, with each incident labeled with the name of the person shot or shot at, the incident report number and whether the person survived. Also included are links to body-cam video and other news coverage, if available.
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In all, there are 151 documented “critical incidents” on the map. The list starts with 19-year-old Jacob Harris, whom Phoenix police officers shot and killed on Jan. 11, 2019. It ends with Joseph Adam Mendez, whom officers shot and killed on April 29 of this year. The map will be updated whenever police shootings occur.
In a couple of instances, the department said that it found that the suspect died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound while officers fired. New Times labeled those as “fatal.” The map does not include an incident that killed Turrell Clay, who died after officers fired multiple less-lethal rounds at him.
Broadly, the map shows a concentration of shootings in South Phoenix and in west Phoenix, particularly along the Interstate 17 corridor, an area that is subject to significant law enforcement activity.
So far this year, Phoenix police officers have shot and killed six people and shot at and injured three more. Last year, Phoenix police officers killed 11 people. Six were killed in a nearly two-month stretch, prompting outrage and criticism from activists who’d hoped the department had turned over a new leaf after killing 14 people in 2024.
That late-summer run of shootings coincided with the hiring of new Police Chief Matt Giordano, who replaced interim chief Michael Sullivan. Sullivan helmed the department as it faced a Department of Justice investigation that resulted in a blistering June 2024 report on the Phoenix police. The report found that Phoenix cops regularly committed civil rights violations, including discriminating against people of color, using excessive and unnecessarily deadly force and arresting unhoused people without cause.
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While there has been a steady drumbeat of police shootings in the years since the DOJ report, the Phoenix Police Department’s numbers are significantly down from a high in 2018, when Phoenix cops killed nearly twice as many people than in 2025, the most by any department in the country that year.
The shootings are investigated by the Major Incidents Division of the Arizona Department of Public Safety. The Maricopa County Attorney’s Office ultimately decides whether criminal charges are brought against the officers. MCAO has pressed charges in two critical incident cases since 2019. Neither case involved Phoenix officers, meaning all the cops in the incidents on this map avoided criminal charges.
The shootings are also subject to an internal review by the Phoenix Police Department. Phoenix police’s policy on the use of deadly force says it is justified only when a “suspect is acting or threatening to cause death or serious physical injury to the employee or others,” and has the opportunity and “the means or instrumentalities to do so.” It also requires that de-escalation tactics “have been tried, have failed, or are determined to have not been feasible,” and that suspects be given “a reasonable opportunity to comply voluntarily.”
It is not clear how many of the shootings since 2019 were found to be outside of department policy.
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