The SPOTLITE team is releasing the Anomaly Detector Dashboard, a new tool designed to identify U.S. counties with unusually high or low numbers of law enforcement uses of lethal force relative to national benchmarks.
Built on SPOTLITE's database of more than 28,000 law enforcement lethal force incidents from 2014-2023, the anomaly detector uses county population, population density, and civilian gun violence (from Gun Violence Archive[tag]) to estimate how many incidents would be expected in each county. It then compares those expectations to observed incidents to identify counties with substantially more or fewer incidents than predicted.
The anomaly detector is not intended to explain why counties differ or to label counties as "good" or "bad." Instead, it provides a consistent, data-driven way to identify places that warrant closer examination and to generate new questions for researchers, journalists, policymakers, law enforcement agencies, and community stakeholders.
We've also released a downloadable dataset and white paper describing the anomaly detector's purpose, methodology, interpretation, and limitations.