As police shootings have become a flashpoint in U.S. cities, The Marshall Project and the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting spent a year examining those urban killings’ little-publicized counterparts in rural America.

Officers in rural areas fatally shot about 1,200 people from 2015 through 2020, while in cities there were at least 2,100 such deaths, according to the news organizations’ analysis of data compiled by The Washington Post; no comprehensive government database exists.

The data analysis found that, although the rate of rural police shootings was about 30% lower than the urban rate when adjusted for population, the rural incidents mirrored many of the dynamics of police shootings that have come under scrutiny in cities.

And even as deadly police shootings declined in cities and rural communities during this time, according to the analysis, the rural decrease was more modest: about 9% versus 19%.

High-profile urban police shootings such as the killing of Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky, have set off protests, prompted widespread calls for change and led to new policies in some law enforcement agencies. But rural deaths seldom attract attention from the public or the national press. Police shootings in isolated areas are rarely captured on video, and many rural officers don’t wear body cameras.

Police and sheriff’s departments that each had a single deadly shooting account for hundreds of the rural fatalities. But in a handful of states, including Kentucky, Pennsylvania and Texas, state troopers are responsible for many of the deaths.

Rural shootings by the Kentucky State Police, the agency with the largest number of such deaths in the six-year period, illustrate both what distinguishes these encounters from other police killings and how they fit within broader patterns nationwide.

Read the full article about police shootings in rural America by Alysia Santo and R.G. Dunlop at The Marshall Project.