Indigenous people in the United States are at higher risk of fatal police violence in and around American Indian/Alaska Native (AIAN) reservations, according to the first comprehensive national study on the subject from researchers at Drexel University's Dornsife School of Public Health and the University of Washington. The study, using data on the 203 AIAN people killed by police from 2013 through 2024, was published today in the journal PNAS . The authors hope this work will inform policy action to better protect these communities.
The team found that roughly three out of four deaths (73%) among AIAN people from police violence occurred on or within 10 miles of reservations, despite only about 40% of AIAN people living there, a number that rises to 50% if multiracial AIAN people are included.
"We know that disinvestment in Indigenous communities living on reservations, along with unique policing models and police harassment on tribal lands, coincide with this disproportionate risk of fatal police violence," said lead author Gabriel Schwartz, PhD , an assistant professor in the Dornsife School of Public Health. "Colonial policies designed to confine, displace and dispossess Indigenous peoples are not just history—they continue to shape who is killed by law enforcement today."
Using data from the U.S. Census and Mapping Police Violence database , the researchers mapped the geographic locations of these deaths and saw a disproportionate risk even after accounting for community features that might influence the findings, such as population density or rurality.
The data also showed differences in the type of police work conducted in tribal lands. Federal, state and tribal police were responsible for the majority of deaths on reservations, while municipal and county police were primarily responsible for deaths that occurred away from reservations (>10 miles). The reasons police gave for stops also differed between tribal lands versus elsewhere, with police giving no reason for stopping one in five of those killed on reservations.
"Indigenous communities have been documenting and resisting police violence for generations — from the American Indian Movement's records of killings in the 1960s to youth-led protests happening right now," said study co-author, Theresa Rocha Beardall, JD, PhD, an associate professor at the University of Washington. "Researchers are still catching up. What this paper does is put rigorous population-level data behind what Native peoples have long understood about their own lives and safety."
The authors hypothesize that border lands, the few miles of land around a reservation, may experience this increase in deaths due to higher concentration of Indigenous people living in these areas who often cross back and forth across reservation borders, alongside frequent racial profiling as people come and go from reservations.
"Fatal interactions with law enforcement on reservations are structurally instigated—by entrenched poverty, poorly funded schools and chronically neglected health systems," said Schwartz. "These inequities are vast and the structures holding them in place must be reimagined. That will likely require a lot of things: Indigenous-led prevention, stronger accountability for police and sustained public health investment."
Future research is needed, the authors say, to measure specific drivers of the geographic disparity in deaths, the psychological and physical health impacts of fatal police violence for Indigenous communities, and what impact proposed solutions (such as Indigenous-led healing and wellness responses to crime and poverty, instead of police) would have on fatal police violence rates.
In addition to Schwartz and Beardall, Jaquelyn L. Jahn, PhD from Drexel's Ubuntu Center on Racism, Global Movements & Population Health Equity was a co-author.
This is not the first time this group has documented fatal police violence inequities for Indigenous people in the U.S. Authors Jaquelyn Jahn and Gabriel Schwartz also found that among all racial groups, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders in the U.S. experience among the highest rates of fatal police violence, according to a 2022 paper analyzing 2013-2019 data from Mapping Police Violence .
This study was partially supported by funding from the National Institutes of Health (U54CA267735).
