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Looking at incidents of police using their firearms across the region

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Officer Involved Shooting

BALTIMORE, Md. — This week in Baltimore County, police shot and killed a man during a domestic call and an off-duty officer with the Maryland National Capital Park Police in Montgomery County shot two people in Parkville.

As part of our In Focus promise, we are committed to diving deeper on stories like these.

We pulled news releases from our coverage area's police departments and sheriff's offices, and looked back at our own coverage to find just how many incidents of police officers firing their weapons at people we could find.

So far this year, including the two incidents this week, we found 6 incidents of police firing their weapons. Half of those resulted in the person dying.

Map Police shootings.jpg

As we looked at this data, WMAR-2 News decided to reach out to the different departments to get the numbers of these incidents from last year.

Baltimore County's police department, as of Friday afternoon, did not get back to us with their numbers.

Several departments had no incidents like this to report, including Carroll County's Sheriff's Office, Harford County's Sheriff's Office and Frederick City's Police Department.

Baltimore City's police department included the shooting death of Officer Keona Holley as a 'police-involved shooting', which we excluded from our data as it was not an instance of a police officer shooting at civilians.

Keona Holley

And we left out one instance from Cecil County's Sheriff's Office that had no additional information.

Here's a closer look at the comparisons of the 14 incidents we found between 2021 and the 6 so far in 2022.

We will update this with the Baltimore County's data, once we receive it.