Background The burden of fatal police violence is an urgent public health crisis in the USA. Mounting evidence shows that deaths at the hands of the police disproportionately impact people of certain races and ethnicities, pointing to systemic racism in policing. Recent high-profile killings by police in the USA have prompted calls for more extensive and public data reporting on police violence. This study examines the presence and extent of under-reporting of police violence in US Government-run vital registration data, offers a method for correcting under-reporting in these datasets, and presents revised estimates of deaths due to police violence in the USA.
Methods We compared data from the USA National Vital Statistics System (NVSS) to three non-governmental, open-source databases on police violence: Fatal Encounters, Mapping Police Violence, and The Counted. We extracted and standardised the age, sex, US state of death registration, year of death, and race and ethnicity (non-Hispanic White, non-Hispanic Black, non-Hispanic of other races, and Hispanic of any race) of each decedent for all data sources and used a network meta-regression to quantify the rate of under-reporting within the NVSS. Using these rates to inform correction factors, we provide adjusted estimates of deaths due to police violence for all states, ages, sexes, and racial and ethnic groups from 1980 to 2019 across the USA.
Findings Across all races and states in the USA, we estimate 30 800 deaths (95% uncertainty interval [UI] 30 300–31 300) from police violence between 1980 and 2018; this represents 17 100 more deaths (16 600–17 600) than reported by the NVSS. Over this time period, the age-standardised mortality rate due to police violence was highest in non-Hispanic Black people (0·69 [95% UI 0·67–0·71] per 100 000), followed by Hispanic people of any race (0·35 [0·34–0·36]), non-Hispanic White people (0·20 [0·19–0·20]), and non-Hispanic people of other races (0·15 [0·14– 0·16]). This variation is further affected by the decedent’s sex and shows large discrepancies between states. Between 1980 and 2018, the NVSS did not report 55·5% (54·8–56·2) of all deaths attributable to police violence. When aggregating all races, the age-standardised mortality rate due to police violence was 0·25 (0·24–0·26) per 100 000 in the 1980s and 0·34 (0·34–0·35) per 100 000 in the 2010s, an increase of 38·4% (32·4–45·1) over the period of study.
Interpretation We found that more than half of all deaths due to police violence that we estimated in the USA from 1980 to 2018 were unreported in the NVSS. Compounding this, we found substantial differences in the age-standardised mortality rate due to police violence over time and by racial and ethnic groups within the USA. Proven public health intervention strategies are needed to address these systematic biases. State-level estimates allow for appropriate targeting of these strategies to address police violence and improve its reporting.
The researchers estimated that official government figures did not report 17,100 deaths from police violence out of 30,800 total deaths during the nearly 40-year period, estimating that the result was a mix of inter-clerical errors and more insidious motivations. Is.
During that period, non-Hispanic black Americans were estimated to be 3.5 times more likely to die from police violence than non-Hispanic white Americans, with nearly 60% of these deaths being misclassified – meaning that he has not been held responsible for the police violence – In official government figures, the researchers found.
The researchers found that government data misclassified 50% of deaths for Hispanic people, 56% of deaths for non-Hispanic white people, and 33% for non-Hispanic deaths of other races.
Similar to previous studies, the researchers found that, behind non-Hispanic black people, non-Hispanic Indigenous people were killed by police at a higher rate than other groups. The researchers found that non-Hispanic Indigenous people were 1.8 times more likely to die from police violence than non-Hispanic white people.
The researchers found that from 1980 to 2010, the rate of police violence for all races increased by 38%.
The researchers found that the top five states with the lowest reporting rates were Oklahoma, Wyoming, Alabama, Louisiana and Nebraska. The states with the highest death rates of police violence were Oklahoma, Washington, DC, Arizona, Alaska, Nevada and Wyoming.
The researchers suggested that underreporting is related to “multiple factors” and offered solutions to collect more accurate data and ultimately end police violence.
Part of the issue may be clerical, the researchers said. Researchers said the coroner or medical examiner may fail to indicate police involvement in the cause of death on death certificates or may have made errors in the process of specifying certain codes.
Some coroners and medical examiners may also feel there are “substantial conflicts of interest” that discourage them from pointing to law enforcement involvement in the death, many work or inherent to police departments, and many to conceal police culpability. feel political or commercial pressure.
Good info, but…
Proven public health intervention strategies are needed to address these systematic biases.
Fuckin’ libs.
I consider abolition a proven and in fact VITAL public health intervention. Howzzat?
:blob-on-fire: :no-police: :think-about-it:
