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Verify: Do officer-involved shootings happen more often in certain areas?

A map of officer-involved shootings this year shows there are areas where these incidents happen more frequently.

PHOENIX - Maricopa County saw its 44th officer-involved shooting Thursday morning, surpassing 2017's total only halfway through this year.

We wanted to verify if there were any areas where police shootings happened more frequently, so we mapped out all 44 shootings that have happened since January.

We found that there do appear to be clusters of shootings in specific areas of Maricopa County, and other places where shootings appear to be rare.

For instance, there were four officer-involved shootings, all of them in March and May, in an area near where Interstate 10 and Interstate 17 cross in Phoenix.

There were also clusters of shootings in the area between 24th Street and the 51 Freeway from Camelback Road to McDowell Road. Another cluster appears in the area surrounding downtown Mesa.

While not always the case, most of these clusters seem to be in lower-income areas.

We also found there has not been an officer-involved shooting in the northeast Phoenix area, while the West Phoenix area has officer-involved shootings scattered throughout.

We also analyzed the results of the 44 officer-involved shootings and found by far the most common result is the a police officer fired and someone died. Almost as often, someone was injured but not killed. It was much more rare for an officer to be injured during a shooting and even more rare for an officer to be killed.

MAP: Valley officer-involved shootings in 2018

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