Indigenous people in the United States are at higher risk of fatal police violence in and around American Indian/Alaska Native (AIAN) reservations, according to the first comprehensive national study on the subject from researchers at the University of Washington and Drexel University.
The study, recently published in PNAS, used data on the 203 AIAN people killed by police from 2013 through 2024. The researchers found that roughly 73%, or three out of four, AIAN people killed by police violence were on or within 10 miles of a reservation. Only about 40% of AIAN people — 50% when including multiracial AIAN people — live on or near reservations. The disproportionate risk held even after accounting for population density and rurality.
“My prior research has documented how policing on and around reservations functions as a form of sovereignty threat — where Indigenous peoples, their movement and their presence on their own lands are treated by law enforcement as problems to be managed,” said Theresa Rocha Beardall, co-author and associate professor of sociology at the UW. “This is the first study to measure what that looks like at the national level.”
The researchers hope the work will inform policy action to better protect Indigenous communities.
“We know that disinvestment in Indigenous communities living on reservations, along with unique policing models and police harassment on tribal lands, coincide with this disproportionate risk of fatal police violence,” said lead author Gabriel Schwartz, an assistant professor in Drexel’s Dornsife School of Public Health “Colonial policies designed to confine, displace and dispossess Indigenous peoples are not just history — they continue to shape who is killed by law enforcement today.”
Federal, state and tribal police were responsible for the majority of deaths on reservations, while municipal and county police were primarily responsible for deaths that occurred more than 10 miles away from reservations. The reasons police gave for stops also differed on and off tribal lands, with police giving no reason for stopping one in five people killed on reservations compared with about one in 10 people killed far from a reservation. The pattern reflects the jurisdictional fragmentation that Rocha Beardall’s prior research has identified as central to the sovereignty threat.
“Indigenous communities have been documenting and resisting police violence for generations, from the American Indian Movement’s records of killings in the 1960s to youth-led protests happening right now,” Rocha Beardall said. “Researchers are still catching up. What this paper does is put rigorous population-level data behind what Native peoples have long understood about where this violence is concentrated and the risks it creates for their nations and communities.”
A high concentration of Indigenous people live in the borderlands surrounding a reservation, and frequently cross in and out. The researchers hypothesize that this flow — combined with frequent racial profiling of people traveling to and from reservations — could increase the likelihood of police encounters and account for an increase in deaths near reservations.
“Fatal interactions with law enforcement on reservations are structurally instigated — by entrenched poverty, poorly funded schools and chronically neglected health systems,” Schwartz said. “These inequities are vast and the structures holding them in place must be reimagined. That will likely require a lot of things: Indigenous-led prevention, stronger accountability for police and sustained public health investment.”
The researchers note that commonly proposed police reforms lack consistent evidence for reducing these inequities.
More research is needed to measure specific drivers of the geographic disparity in deaths, the psychological and physical health impacts of fatal police violence for Indigenous communities, and what impact proposed solutions — such as Indigenous-led healing and wellness responses to crime and poverty — would have on fatal police violence rates.
Jaquelyn Jahn of Drexel University was also a co-author.
The study was partially supported by funding from the National Institutes of Health.
For more information, contact Rocha Beardall at tyrb@uw.edu.
This story was adapted from a release by Drexel University.