Study: Rural and suburban areas see higher rates of police shootings than cities

• A lack of media coverage in rural and suburban areas — and uneven accountability measures in rural police agencies — often give the public an inaccurate view of such shootings, analysts say.
• Fatal shootings by police in big cities typically get far more attention because of media coverage and local activists who mobilize rapidly.

Zoom in: From 2015 to 2020, 45% of all shootings by law enforcement occurred in rural areas and 22% in the suburbs, a new study published in the June edition of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine found.

• Black and Native American residents of urban areas were most disproportionately affected by police shootings, but injury rates also were high among suburban and rural Black residents, along with rural Native Americans, the study found.
• These groups' per capita rates of injury from shootings by police were three to five times higher than rates of injury among whites living in similar areas.
• Rates of injury to Hispanic residents of urban, suburban and rural areas were nearly two times higher than non-Hispanic white residents' rates of injury.

Zoom out: The study used national data built from the Gun Violence Archive and created a nationwide analysis of individuals in the U.S. who were injured or killed in shootings by police.

What they're saying: "It appears that many of the same things are going on in suburban and rural areas that are going on in urban areas, whereas our reform discussions aren't," lead investigator Julie Ward, assistant professor of medicine, health, and society at Vanderbilt University, tells Axios.

The other side: Darren White, a former Bernalillo County Sheriff in New Mexico, said the study shows that no place is immune to violence — but that training might be an issue in smaller law enforcement agencies.

• "I'm not super surprised by this at all since many officers in the larger agencies get a lot of training," White said.

The big picture: The advocacy group Campaign Zero last month released a detailed neighborhood-level analysis of police killings since 2014 that showed areas with significantly higher percentages of Black, Latino and Native American residents with more killings by police.

• Native Americans are 3.2 times more likely and Latinos are 1.3 times more likely to be killed by police than white Americans, the group found.

Derek Hyra, author of "Slow and Sudden Violence: Why and When Uprisings Occur," said greater scrutiny was placed on police departments in major cities after the killing of George Floyd and subsequent uprisings in 2020. But aggressive policing is a systemic issue.

• "We brought some transparency with what was happening in Black and brown communities," Hyra said. "We took down some racist monuments and we changed the names of schools that were named after Confederate leaders. But we need to ask ourselves whether we have changed the context of neighborhood inequalities."