A new Austin police shooting dashboard is raising questions about who is most often involved in deadly encounters with officers and whether the department is adequately preparing new recruits to avoid using lethal force.
Data released Tuesday by Austin Police Oversight, an independent office that monitors the Austin Police Department, shows Hispanic men were the demographic group most often shot by Austin officers between 2018 and 2025, while officers involved in shootings had relatively little experience on the force.
The dashboard, built over the past year by Austin Police Oversight, tracks police shooting locations, demographic information, reasons for police involvement and case outcomes. Activists and police experts say the tool can help identify long-term trends, inform future policy discussions and hold officers accountable.
The data also immediately raises questions about APD training practices because officers involved in shootings often were early in their careers.
“It does leave me concerned about what it implies about the failure of APD to institute training policies that instruct or coach officers on how to be less likely to use lethal force against residents,” said Austin Justin Coalition’s Peter Hunt. “This is an eight-year data set. If APD were instituting policies that effectively train officers to be less likely to needlessly use firearms in situations, you would expect to see the [officer’s] age actually increase over this data set.”
What the dashboard shows
The dashboard documents 60 police shootings between 2018 and 2025. Of those cases, 36 ended in fatality, and Hispanic men accounted for about 44% of those killed. All but one of the civilians involved in the shootings were men.
About 70% of the 151 officers involved in the shootings were white, while a little under a quarter were Hispanic. The average age of officers involved was just over 30, and about half had fewer than four years of experience. The data also shows officers used less-lethal weapons, such as a taser or pepper ball launcher, in about 17% of the shootings.
Most of the shootings occurred in the neighborhoods in north central and northeast Austin neighborhoods, while District 6, in northwest Austin, had the least.
Hunt said the tool provides important insight into police shootings, but it could be improved by offering more context. For example, the dashboard does not break down the racial demographics of APD’s sworn officers as a whole to compare with the demographics of those involved in the shootings.
“I think it is a weakness of this dashboard as it’s presented,” Hunt said, “and may lead to some misleading conclusions, or make it harder to draw conclusions.”
The Austin Police Department did not respond to questions about the data set.
Making sense of the data
Texas State University Criminology Professor Brian Withrow said it’s often officers new to the force who take shift assignments in higher crime areas, which could help explain why more of the officers involved in police shootings have fewer years of experience.
Withrow cautioned against drawing firm conclusions from the data alone. He said officers more often patrol higher-density, lower-income neighborhoods, where higher concentrations of Hispanic men live, which could help explain why they appear more frequently in these shootings.
“There tends to be patterns that strongly correlate between socioeconomic status, employment, poverty and active policing,” Withrow said. “That’s not something new in criminal justice.”
Withrow said public dashboards that track officer-involved shootings are still relatively uncommon, but he hopes the tool can help identify patterns that eventually lead to better training, improved de-escalation tactics and fewer deadly encounters.
“When we create those measures of accountability, in particular for the use of deadly force, I think it’s important for the community to be able to see that and see how the police are performing,” Withrow said.
