LAPD officer-involved shootings up nearly 50% compared to last year, chief says
Police shootings in Los Angeles are up nearly 50%, according to new data released by Chief Jim McDonnell.
The chief discussed the new numbers during Tuesday's police commission meeting.
McDonnell said year to date, the LAPD has recorded 31 officer-involved involved shootings compared to 21 last year, marking a 47.6% increase.
"The five-year average is 32 incidents annually," the chief said. "With 31 already in the first nine months, the year-end totals are on to meet - or possibly exceed - the historical average given that four months remain in 2025."
Nearly 82% of the officer-involved shooting cases began with citizens calling LAPD for help as opposed to proactive enforcement, according to McDonnell.
"South Bureau continues to account for the largest share of incidents with Southwest, Rampart, Southeast and Olympic divisions most impacted," he said.
While firearms were the primary resolution by officers, the chief said "less lethal tools" were used in about a third of the cases. He added that roughly one in four suspects in the cases showed signs of mental illness.
When the chief was asked about increasing the use of less lethal force, he said that's always the first option.
"Oftentimes, time is what drives the inability to be able to deploy less lethal," he explained. "If somebody is armed with a gun then you don't have the opportunity to be able to use less lethal. You have to be able to use what you can to direct them to drop the weapon and to surrender, but when there's an opportunity and somebody's armed with a bat or a pipe or a knife, and you have an ability to have a standoff - distance between the officers, the public, and the suspect - then certainly less lethal is the first thought in what is deployed regularly. A third of the time, that opportunity was available in the cases looked at, but certainly, we're always trying to put ourselves in a position of advantage when we get a call, when we make an observation that we don't get any closer than we absolutely need to to the suspect. So we have that benefit of time and distance to be able to try and deescalate a situation and then only going to lethal force when absolutely no other alternative is available."
ABC7's data team crunched crime data and when you look at just in the city of L.A., and all types of crime are trending downward.
