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MCAO Reports 43 Officer-Involved Shootings Last Year In Maricopa County

There were 43 officer-involved shootings in Maricopa County last year. The county attorney’s office is still in the process of reviewing the details of all those cases. 

Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery hasn’t filed any criminal charges in the 20 officer-involved shootings he has finished reviewing; 11 suspects died in those incidents. Montgomery said even without criminal charges, an officer may still face other consequences. 

“The officer may have violated department policy when they engaged in that use-of-force incident," he said. "We may technically clear, from a criminal prosecution standpoint, a particular police officer, but that doesn’t mean they won’t face discipline by their own department.” 

Between 2011 and 2014, 108 suspects died as a result of these officer-involved shootings in Maricopa County. There isn’t a federal agency that tracks how many civilians have been fatally shot by police officers, because local law enforcement isn’t required to report those numbers. The Washington Postcompiled data from local agencies and found last year 984 people were fatally shot by police officers in 2015.

Alexandra Olgin was a Senior Field Correspondent at KJZZ from 2013 to 2016.