Who did law-enforcement officers shoot in California? The most powerful and tragic images often came from racially segregated and underserved areas, including the 2009 killing of Oscar Grant and the 2014 killing of Ezell Ford. Yet the historical records examined here showed that residents of some remote towns and southern desert cities were more likely to be killed by officers—not only per capita, but sometimes in raw numbers.

The analysis used killings classified by medical examiners as “deaths by legal intervention” and then tabulated by the state’s health statistics system. Its decade-long dataset counted 810 California law-enforcement killings during the 2000s. These records may understate the total, and reporting practices may have differed between cities, but they represented the most comprehensive figures then available.

What the historical comparison found

Among cities with at least five recorded law-enforcement killings from 2003 through 2010, several smaller communities produced annual totals that met or exceeded those of much larger cities.

Moreno Valley averaged 1.5 killings per year; Vista, 1.0; and Perris, 0.6. Oakland and Sacramento averaged 0.8 and 0.5 respectively. In 2010, officers in Perris, Moreno Valley, and Hemet—whose combined population was about 300,000—shot six people to death. Officers in Los Angeles, Oakland, and Compton, with a combined population then near 4.4 million, killed five.

The state’s largest cities still recorded the highest raw totals across the study period: Los Angeles averaged 5.0 police killings annually, followed by San Diego at 3.5. But the comparison raised a difficult question. Why did Eureka, then home to roughly 21,000 people, record a killing about as often as Sacramento, a city more than twenty times larger? Why did suburban Rancho Cucamonga record more officer killings than similarly populated Salinas?

Cities long associated with aggressive policing also produced rates below or near the statewide average in this dataset. Los Angeles recorded 1.6 fatal police shootings per million residents annually and Oakland recorded 2.5, compared with the state average of 2.1. Compton’s rate was 9.0, while Desert Hot Springs reached 22.8.

One possible explanation was that officers in remote, fast-growing satellite cities encountered more violent trafficking or flight-related incidents. The demographics of those killed did not establish that conclusion. The six people killed by officers in three desert cities during 2010 included two white, two Latino, and two Black residents, ranging from age 18 to 63.

Many shootings in remote towns, as in large cities, appeared to follow confrontations involving armed suspects. Others prompted local protest, including the 2014 killing of unarmed Tommy McClain by Eureka police, but received limited national attention.

Whatever produced the pattern—including possible deficiencies in the underlying statistics—the data showed that “officer-involved shootings” encompassed widely varying circumstances. Generalizations based only on the most visible incidents could obscure important differences between communities. The second part of this analysis examines the ways California’s historical pattern did align with more familiar expectations.

This article draws on an analysis originally published by the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice. It has been edited for archive clarity and dated to identify its republication context.