Counts · not a census · October 14, 2026
There is no one number.
Montana has no state database of people shot by police. A newsroom file does count on-duty fatal shootings from 2015 through 2024, and it is kept separate below. The medical examiner’s office said in its 2018 and 2019 reports that a statewide death-investigation database was still a project. The figures on this page are not added together.
Medical examiner cases, 2020–2025
Each annual report counts cases the office considered inmates, or deaths in the presence of law enforcement. The 2025 report calls the previous five-year average 35 a year. A homicide line inside that mix is not a count of people shot. Suicide, natural death, and accident are in the same total. The office says the series is cases coroners sent in, not every death investigated in the state.
| Year | Mixed total | Homicide manner | What else is inside |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | 31 | Not printed in the overview | Called “in custody deaths.” |
| 2021 | 32 | Not printed in the overview | Called “in-custody deaths.” |
| 2022 | 35 | 7 | Also 9 suicide, 10 accident, 6 natural, 3 other. |
| 2023 | 37 | 8 | Also 12 suicide, 9 accident, 7 natural, 1 undetermined. |
| 2024 | 44 | 12 | Also 16 suicide, 9 accident, 5 natural, 2 fetal. |
| 2025 | 23 | 3 | Also 10 suicide, 1 accident, 9 natural. |
2015 through 2019 are not filled in. The 2018 and 2019 reports on the department site do not print this custody total. Adding 31, 32, 35, 37, 44, and 23 produces 202 submitted cases. That sum is still not “202 people shot by police.”
A second count, 2019–2023
Montana DPHHS counted 79 law-enforcement-involved fatal encounters under a 2022 surveillance definition: 15 in 2019, 19 in 2020, 16 in 2021, 12 in 2022, and 17 in 2023. Of the 79, the report calls 40 legal intervention, 26 suicide, 11 unintentional, and 2 homicide. Firearms were the mechanism in 67. The same report says older death-certificate coding had found 34 legal-intervention deaths. This is not the medical examiner series.
CDC rankings, and the top 10 that is not this
The CDC’s 10 leading causes of death in 2023 were heart disease, cancer, unintentional injury, stroke, chronic lower respiratory diseases, Alzheimer disease, diabetes, kidney disease, chronic liver disease, and COVID-19. Legal intervention is not on that list.
On death certificates coded as legal intervention, DPHHS reported Montana’s age-adjusted rate for 2019–2023 as 0.71 per 100,000, second after New Mexico. The report does not print ranks 3 through 10. This desk does not invent them. CDC WONDER can tabulate the same certificates, and it forbids republishing death counts of 9 or fewer. No WONDER extract is copied here.
A newsroom count of fatal shootings, 2015–2024
The Washington Post’s Fatal Force file is the public list that starts in 2015. It counts a police officer, in the line of duty, shooting and killing a civilian. It does not count deaths in custody, shootings by off-duty officers, or deaths that were not shootings. Version 2 of the file runs from January 1, 2015 through December 31, 2024. The Post said it would track that decade and then stop. Each row needed two sources and an editor.
The file has 10,430 rows nationally. The Montana rows are 69: 4 in 2015, 5 in 2016, 6 in 2017, 6 in 2018, 6 in 2019, 10 in 2020, 7 in 2021, 7 in 2022, 7 in 2023, and 11 in 2024. The city field is Billings on 17 rows, Great Falls on 8, and Missoula on 7. The Post marked a body camera on 5 of the 69 and not on 64. This is not the medical examiner’s mixed total, and it is not added to 202.
Names stay in the Post’s file. This page does not reprint them. washingtonpost/data-police-shootings, the Post’s database. The data is published CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.
ICE use of force, which is not a death count
A second Post repository holds a limited cut of internal ICE use-of-force reports: 1,460 incidents dated January 1, 2024 through February 28, 2026. The Post says no data dictionary came with the records, and the files can contain extraction errors. These are not deaths, and they are not a complete census. This desk does not reprint the narratives or the participant lists.
A search of that file for Montana place names did not find a Montana detention facility. Three rows name Camp East Montana. The file places that camp with ERO El Paso, not with this state.
wpinvestigative/ice-reports. Story: Internal ICE records reveal widespread use of force in detention centers, May 4, 2026.
A use-of-force lawsuit this desk cannot read
The Media Law Resource Center page titled “Washington Post Wins Access to Police Use of Force Records” is a member login. The order, the court, and the records at issue are not on the public page. This desk does not describe a holding it has not read.
medialaw.org/washington-post-wins-access-to-police-use-of-force-records
Other public mechanisms
- Coroner, county by county. A death in a jail, or while a person is being taken into custody, is a coroner inquiry under MCA 46-4-122. Lewis and Clark County’s 2024 coroner summary counted 5 in-custody deaths and 3 officer-involved deaths. That is one county. It is not the state’s 44.
- Department of Corrections roll. A separate public list of deaths in state custody. No cause of death on the roll. Do not add it to the medical examiner totals.
- Federal Death in Custody Reporting Act. Montana’s plan says the state does not keep a DCRA website. It uses death certificates flagged in the violent-death system, the DOC page, and DCI. A federal collection with missing states is not this state’s census.
- FBI use-of-force file. Voluntary reports of death, serious injury, or a firearm discharge toward a person. It is not a complete Montana count of people shot.
Bed counts are a different page. They are not added to any death series on this one. The bed is counted. The death is not.