Alton “JR” Tungovia stands with his goddaughter, Clarissa Apache-Tungovia, at her fifth-grade graduation at Dolores Gonzales Elementary in Albuquerque, N.M., on May 22, 2018. Alton Tungovia, from Isleta Pueblo Indian Community, was shot and killed by Phoenix police in 2023. (Photo courtesy of Bryneen Gallegos)
PHOENIX – The Phoenix Police Department shared details of Turrell Clay’s Jan. 10 arrest and subsequent death in news and video releases intended to show transparency about situations when officers use force.
His was the first civilian death of 2025 involving Phoenix officers.
The department will release more details in a public database of use-of-force incidents after the department reviews it internally, a process that can take months.
But one critical data point will be missing: Clay’s death.That’s because the department only includes the death of a civilian if police officers shot them with lethal force, not if the death resulted from some other kind of force or if the civilian died in police custody.
The Howard Center for Investigative Journalism spent months pouring through the department’s data and found other gaps as well. The department’s officer-involved shooting data doesn’t include the names of civilians who were shot at, or the names of the officers who shot at them, even though those names are included in news releases. The data identifies officers by badge number.
In rare instances, officers involved in shootings are found to have broken department policy, but those outcomes aren’t included either.
The use-of-force data details the force used against a civilian but says nothing about whether a civilian died from it.
The Howard Center found that some gaps in the data stem from how the department organizes it, putting some details in an officer-involved-shooting database and others in a much larger use-of-force database.
Some of the data overlap between the two databases, some exist in only one dataset or the other and some simply aren’t included in either.
The result, the Howard Center found, is data that is less transparent than it seems.
To gain a more complete picture of officer-involved shootings, the Howard Center added details about each shooting from the department’s use-of-force database and media releases; the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office; the Maricopa County Medical Examiner’s Office; the Washington Post database of police shootings; and Mapping Police Violence, which captures national data about police uses of force, which compiles data from media reports and other sources.
The Howard Center’s analysis of that combined data found:
- From 2017 to 2024, Phoenix police officers shot at a civilian, on average, twice a month, or nearly 190 shootings in eight years; over half of those civilians, 102, died.
- Racial and ethnic minorities accounted for 70% of shootings, and those groups were overrepresented compared to their share of Phoenix’s population.
- One in every four civilians that Phoenix police shot at were not armed with a firearm.
- Phoenix police injured people 85% of the time they used force against them since 2021, the first year the department included injury data.
The Howard Center also identified 24 deaths – including Clay’s recent one – that were not counted in the department’s data.
The department reports so-called in-custody deaths separately to the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office, which decides if criminal charges are warranted and publicizes those determinations.
The county attorney’s office also reviews officer-involved shootings. From 2017 to 2024 , the office has found every Phoenix shooting except one legally justified under Arizona law.
All of the data that the Howard Center analysed was entered before the department’s new use-of-force policy went into effect on Feb. 18. The new policies direct officers to only use force that is “objectively reasonable, necessary, and proportional to effectively and safely resolve an incident.”
In written responses to questions from the Howard Center, the Police Department said it was committed to transparency, accountability and sharing information with the public.
“It is important to understand that raw numbers alone do not provide a complete or accurate picture of the complex situations surrounding use of force,” the statement said. “Data may show the frequency and type of force used, but it does not explain the specific actions of individuals involved. It also fails to reflect the thousands of police interactions officers have on a weekly basis, where no force is used.”
Phoenix police began collecting more use-of-force data and making it publicly available in 2021, before the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) under the Biden administration launched an investigation into the department’s record.
The DOJ’s June 2024 report, retracted by the DOJ in May under the Trump administration, found Phoenix police routinely violated the constitutional rights of citizens by deploying excessive and unjustified force, particularly against vulnerable people.
The DOJ also found gaps in the kind of data the department collected, and reported that the department failed to use its data to identify significant trends, such as whether officers discriminated against certain racial and ethnic groups.
In May, the DOJ under the Trump administration retracted the department’s investigation into the Phoenix Police Department and retracted or closed investigations into five others. The department moved to dismiss lawsuits against Louisville and Minneapolis.
The Howard Center’s analysis identified 33 Phoenix officers who were involved in more than one shooting since 2017. Fifteen of those officers each shot at two civilians who died. One shot at three who died.
In rare instances, the Police Department finds officers violated policy after internal reviews.
It has found at least six shootings out of policy since 2021, the first year that it began disclosing out-of-policy shootings. Three civilians died in those cases.
Since 2018, when the department began publicizing all use of force, not just shootings, Phoenix police have used force against people about 7,600 times. That means police have used force more than 1,000 times every year, an average of about three times each day.
Since 2021, the department has found 54 use-of-force incidents that were outside policy.
In only four of those incidents were the civilians reported to have had a gun. In all the others, the civilian did not possess a firearm, yet the officers used force later determined by the department’s own investigation to be out of policy.
The Howard Center’s analysis of the racial makeup of civilians found that minorities, particularly Black people, were disproportionately shot at by Phoenix police officers.
Black people make up 8% of Phoenix’s population but accounted for 21% of people shot at by police.
From 2017 to 2024, the most recent year of complete data, Phoenix ranked third among U.S. cities for any deaths involving police, after Los Angeles and Houston, according to a national database maintained by Mapping Police Violence.
Samuel Sinyangwe, a policy analyst and data scientist who created the database, said police departments use data to tell their story and defend their actions, “not necessarily to be transparent about what’s actually happening.”
Michael Scott, the director of the Center for Problem-Oriented Policing at Arizona State University, has worked with Phoenix police and told the Howard Center that the department isn’t sufficiently staffed for detailed data collection and analysis.
“It has far fewer crime analysts than, far fewer than I think is necessary for an agency that size, and it doesn’t really have a kind of research and planning department,”he said.
For some community and civil rights leaders, the department’s commitment to data transparency has long been a major concern.
“They have not set up their systems to be transparent with the community about the level of death and violence that community members experience,” said Ben Laughlin, co-director of Poder in Action, a Phoenix-based grassroots advocacy organization that focuses on combating excessive use of force by police.
The state of New Jersey is a national leader in collecting police use-of-force data and presenting it to the public transparently, Sinyangwe said..
Unlike Phoenix’s officer-involved shooting database, which identifies officers by badge number, New Jersey’s database includes the names of officers involved in shootings.
“Having the names of the officers is not impossible,” Sinyangwe said. “It’s not something that’s never been done or can’t be done. It is done.”
New Jersey’s database also includes if the officer was in uniform or not, the officer’s age and rank, and details about injuries and type of medical treatment if any stemming from use of force incidents.
“So if they can do it,” Sinyangwe said, “I guess the question is, why can’t you?”
In its statement, the department said citizens could obtain additional information about particular incidents by submitting a public records request.
“We are continuously looking at ways to improve the information provided on our public facing website and look to national best practices and external input to provide the information most often requested,” the statement said.
Police data not standardized
(Video by L. M. Boyd and Alessandra De Zubeldia/Howard Center for Investigative Journalism at ASU)
Experts interviewed by the Howard Center said police data can only reveal or explain so much.
“Police have a really unique power and responsibility to be able to use deadly force when they decide that it’s called for,” said Julie Ward, assistant professor in the Department of Medicine, Health, and Society at Vanderbilt University. “We don’t have great insight into how often that happens, and what the circumstances are surrounding that.”
Sinyangwe said comparing use-of-force data among different police departments is challenging because the data is not standardized.
That’s particularly true for how departments describe and categorize the types of force both officers and civilians used or possessed during arrests or other encounters, he said.
Phoenix has 12 different categories of force that an officer may use during an incident, including firearms, dogs that can bite on command, impact weapons that fire hard plastic batons, physical restraints such as handcuffs and physical force such as strikes from an open or closed fist.
The department has five categories of force, including firearms, that civilians could use against officers. Other categories include blunt objects or cutting instruments such as knives. Even when a civilian has no weapon, the department may categorize them as having used “bodily force,” defined as “whether the individual was armed with bodily force (e.g., punching, kicking).”
From 2017 to 2024, more than 45 civilians who Phoenix police officers shot at did not have a firearm, according to the Howard Center’s analysis of Phoenix police data. Twenty-six of them died, according to the data.
Some of those more than 45 civilians were armed with knives, scissors or some other type of bladed object. Some were driving vehicles that police classified as a weapon. Some carried blunt objects or were observed throwing rocks.
Three were not armed with anything at all.
One of them was a man named Ethan Fuller.
Ethan Fuller stands for a portrait outside his family’s home in Columbus, Ind., on Sunday, Mar. 30, 2025. Fuller survived a shooting by a Phoenix police officer in 2023. (Lillian Boyd/Howard Center)
Unarmed and lucky to be alive
In the early morning hours of March 8, 2023, Phoenix police Officer Zachary Wheeler responded to a call at the Tufesa Bus Station in Maryvale about a man wanting to turn himself in for sexual assault. The man was Fuller.
Wheeler asked Fuller to step outside to talk, body-camera footage showed. Fuller complied and tried to explain himself when Wheeler asked Fuller to step away. Fuller’s compliance shifted to irritation.
The unarmed man then shoved the officer, according to a police report.
Wheeler deployed his Taser and shocked Fuller, sending him to the ground. But as Wheeler attempted to cuff Fuller, he kicked the officer away, got back up and lunged at Wheeler.
“My mind just snapped into something more primal, where all kind of reasoning, all kind of intelligent thought about the situation went out the window, and slipped into a more primal, just frustrated, angry place,” Fuller told Howard Center reporters. “I just wanted to completely get rid of this horrible situation that was happening.”
While bodycam footage shows Fuller disregarding the dropped Taser, Wheeler later told officers he thought Fuller had grabbed the weapon, which was how Wheeler justified drawing his handgun and firing two quick rounds. Fuller sustained gunshot injuries to his trachea and esophagus from one bullet. The other bullet hit him just above his heart.
Fuller was accused of assaulting the officer prior to the shooting. Because Phoenix police intended to book him on criminal charges, he was not permitted any visitors for the six weeks he was hospitalized and recovering from his wounds, according to Fuller and multiple relatives.
Fuller’s mother sent balloons to his room so that when he woke up, he’d know that someone was aware of his condition.
Some officers demonstrated kindness and compassion, according to Fuller, like the officer who comforted him ahead of a surgery.
Other officers showed disdain, like the one, according to Fuller, who wished he was dead.
Fuller’s statement to the judge, as well as letters that his friends and family submitted, paint Fuller as a gentle soul with a propensity to help people. He performed in a boys’ choir, volunteered for Mike Pence’s gubernatorial campaign, played guitar on street corners in Sedona, coached tennis, worked as a massage therapist and volunteered at senior living homes.
The sexual assault he wanted to turn himself in for never happened, and was part of an hallucination he experienced in the bus terminal, following several weeks of intense therapy, hallucinogenic trips and sleepless nights, Fuller told the Howard Center in an interview.
Ultimately, Fuller agreed to plead guilty to a lesser charge of attempted assault on a police officer and moved back in with his parents in Indiana to carry out his probation. He lost full mobility in his right arm and has weakened vocal cords as a result of the shooting, rendering him unable to sing like he used to, play guitar or continue his career in massage therapy.
The Police Department deemed Wheeler’s use of force out of police policy– a detail Fuller was not aware of until the Howard Center contacted him.
According to Wheeler’s attorney, the department’s Critical Incident Review Board had determined that the incident was within use-of-force policy, but then-Interim Police Chief Michael Sullivan rejected the recommendation without explanation.
The Phoenix Police Department declined to provide further details because Wheeler’s case is still open.
The department also determined that Fuller, even though he carried no weapon, was “armed” because he used “bodily force” against Wheeler when he lunged at him.
Native American man shot carrying metal object
Phoenix police shot Alton “JR” Tungovia, a 37-year-old man who belonged to the Isleta Pueblo Indian Community, while he was holding something in his hand. Tungovia is one of the eight Native Americans shot at by Phoenix police officers since 2017.
On Dec. 16, 2023, Phoenix officers responded to a report of a fight near 44th Street and McDowell Road, where it was reported that Tungovia had stabbed another man with an unidentified object, according to the incident report.
By the time officers spotted Tungovia on McDowell, he’d attempted to steal a bicycle and fought with another man who had followed him from the location of the stabbing, according to the incident report.
The officers who observed Tungovia as he weaved through traffic or walked on the sidewalk described the object in his hand a half-dozen different ways: “a metal object,” “knife,” “a metallic object,” “something metallic,” “a shiny object” and “a silver or metallic object.”
But it wasn’t a firearm.
Tungovia repeatedly ignored police commands to stop as he made his way along McDowell.
When one officer ordered him to stop, Tungovia shot back, “Why don’t you hit me with real bullets?” and kept walking, according to the incident report.
Officers attempted to stop him with an irritant shot from a launcher, similar to a paintball gun. When that didn’t work, another officer prepared to use his Taser. But it was too late.
By then, another officer had shot Tungovia four times as he walked along the sidewalk. Tungovia was transported to the hospital, but later died from his wounds.
One of the officer’s shots hit Tungovia after he was already on the ground, according to bodycam footage of the shooting.
The officer told investigators he shot Tungovia because he feared that Tungovia might attack a motorist or a passerby. The officer said he also believed that Tungovia might hurt someone to provoke officers into shooting him, given that he’d told officers he wanted to be shot.
The incident report did not indicate if the officer was aware that another officer was about to attempt to stop Tungovia with a Taser.
Evidence collected around where Tungovia fell included a section of metal tube; a small, flat piece of metal; an ink pen reservoir; a short section of small diameter white metal rod; and a vape cartridge.
The Maricopa County Attorney’s Office reviewed the incident and determined that no criminal act was committed by the officer who shot Tungovia.
The Phoenix Police Department also found Tungovia’s shooting within policy, but the city’s Office of Accountability and Transparency (OAT), which reviews some shootings, found in April that the department’s investigation was “not thorough and complete.”
The transparency office recommended that the department implement strategies that could better help it understand how officers decide to use force, respond to people with mental illness, consider less-lethal options and de-escalate confrontations.
The department responded that it had already implemented the recommendations.
When she watched the Phoenix police’s video of her older brother’s shooting, Bryneen Gallegos said she was shocked and angry that the officers didn’t try harder to calm her brother down.
“We were in disbelief that they didn’t even attempt to try anything,” Gallegos said.
In Albuquerque, where the Tungovia family lives, Tungovia had confrontations with police that officers were able to de-escalate, she said.
Tungovia was as gentle as a teddy bear and loved fishing, Gallegos said. But her brother had a long battle with his mental health and had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and dissociative identity disorder. He’d struggled with suicidal thoughts since he was 19, she said.
Tungovia had come to Phoenix seeking help and to re-enroll in a drug rehabilitation program that later turned out to be a scam, Gallegos said.Their brother Lance had died seven months earlier, and his death sent Tungovia into a tailspin, she said.
“He was grieving hard,” Gallegos said. “I knew he was having one of his moments … a really hard one.”
When police data leads to reforms
In reporting this story, the Howard Center learned about cities that have employed criminologists and law enforcement experts to help them analyse their use-of-force data and recommend strategies to improve policing.
One of them is Mesa.
In 2022, Mesa police officers shot at 17 civilians, a record high and almost twice the number of shootings as the year before. The department’s leaders wanted to know why, so they asked experts at Arizona State University to undertake what’s called a Sentinel Event Review.
The goal of sentinel reviews is to identify police practices that contributed to bad outcomes, and recommend improvements, often by identifying training needs. The reviews don’t attempt to assign blame.
The reviews invite feedback from members of the community, and in Mesa, 18 volunteers participated.
The review of Mesa found that nearly half the officer-involved shootings began less than a minute after police made contact with the civilian, often without enough time for officers to assess risks to nearby civilians.
The review prompted the department to make numerous changes to policies and training and to redesign its incident review board to include outside experts on the use of force.
Data Methodology: How we got the story
Howard Center reporters used the Phoenix Police Department’s Officer-Involved Shooting (OIS) database as the foundation for an expanded dataset, supplementing it with information from several additional sources: the Use of Force (UOF) database, Phoenix Police Department media releases, Maricopa County Attorney’s Office (MCAO) charging decisions, Maricopa County Medical Examiner (MCMEO) records, the Washington Post Police Shooting Database, and Mapping Police Violence (MPV).
This allowed us to capture variables not available in the original OIS database, including the attorney’s decisions on criminal charges, names of involved officers and civilians shot at by police, medical examiner case numbers, date and manner of death, primary and contributory causes of death, and the status of medical examiner reports.
The UOF database covers incidents from January 2018 to Jan. 31, 2025. However, information identifying whether a use-of-force incident violated departmental policy or specifying the level of injury for each individual is available only from Jan. 1, 2021, forward. The department updates UOF data monthly, but with a three-month lag due to internal reporting and review processes, so Jan. 31, 2025, was the latest data available as of May 2025, when this story was reported. The OIS data covers Jan. 1, 2017, through Dec. 31, 2024.
The Phoenix department’s OIS database does not include the names of civilians shot at or the officers who shot at them, although these names are often found in the department’s media releases. Reporters addressed this gap by matching OIS cases with media releases using the incident number, officer badge number and incident date. When the names of civilians were not found in Phoenix police media releases, the Howard Center obtained them from the Washington Post Police Shooting Database and the Mapping Police Violence database.
Reporters further collected information from the Maricopa County Medical Examiner’s Office website, including medical examiner case numbers, date and manner of death, primary and contributory causes of death, and the status of the medical examiner’s report.
To contextualize Phoenix’s record compared to other major cities, we used the Mapping Police Violence database, which tracks all police-caused deaths — including those not involving firearms. This comparison shows that Phoenix is among the deadliest cities, following Los Angeles and Houston.
The Phoenix police data only includes the death of a civilian in its OIS dataset if the death resulted from an officer-involved shooting, not if the civilian died from another type of police force or in custody. To identify how many additional civilians have died other than in shootings, we cross-matched Mapping Police Violence data and the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office’s decisions on in-custody deaths. First, the Howard Center downloaded the MPV Airtable dataset (national coverage), filtered it to Phoenix city, further filtered it to cases involving the Phoenix Police Department, and restricted it to the period from 2017 onward to match the time frame of Phoenix’s datasets. Reporters applied an additional filter to exclude cases where the cause of death was listed as a gunshot, isolating non-shooting deaths during interactions with police. This yielded eight cases in which civilians died during police interactions where firearms were not used.
The Howard Center also checked the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office’s decisions on whether to charge police officers involved in in-custody deaths since 2017. Reporters filtered out cases from other jurisdictions within Maricopa County and focused only on those involving the Phoenix Police Department. That identified 24 in-custody deaths since 2017 that were not included in any Phoenix PD database. The Howard Center cross-matched these 24 in-custody deaths with the Mapping Police Violence dataset and found seven overlapping cases. One additional MPV case — a woman who died after running a red light and crashing into a Phoenix police cruiser — was not included on the county attorney’s list and is also excluded from our final count. As a result, the Howard Center reported 24 unique in-custody death cases.
Looking at the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office’s decisions on whether to charge police officers involved in shootings, from 2017 to 2024, all but one of Phoenix police officer-involved shootings received a “cleared” decision.
Whether an incident was within the Phoenix Police Department’s policy is reported only in the UOF database, making it difficult to identify how many OIS incidents were out of policy. To determine which officer-involved shootings were deemed within policy, the Howard Center cross-matched OIS and UOF data. However, for at least 14 OIS incidents occurring between Feb. 19, 2024, and Dec. 31, 2024, the UOF database as of May 1, 2025, was not updated to include any corresponding OIS cases, making it impossible to determine policy compliance for these incidents.
In the final stages of the reporting, the Howard Center shared its findings with the Phoenix Police Department in April and made several adjustments to the data based on the department’s feedback.
This story was produced by the students at the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, an initiative of the Scripps Howard Foundation in honor of the late news industry executive and pioneer Roy W. Howard.