New Delhi: A new study published in The Lancet finds that more than 55 percent of police violence deaths in the US between 1980 and 2018 were not reported or misclassified in the US National Vital Statistics System (NVSS). .
The study also found that black Americans were 3.5 times more likely to experience deadly police violence than white Americans, and had the highest death rates from police violence.
The Lancet said in a statement that the new study is one of the longest study periods ever to address this topic.
Researchers estimate that more than 17,000 deaths due to police violence were not accurately reported or classified by the NVSS, the government system that collects all death certificates in the United States.
Fablina Sharara, co-lead author of the study, said the recent attention has been drawn to high-profile police killings of black people around the world, which she said is an urgent public health crisis.
Sharra said the extent of the crisis cannot be fully understood without reliable data, and that persistent systematic racism in many US institutions, including law enforcement, is unclear due to misreporting or misclassification of deaths of black Americans as a result of police violence. Is. . Police violence can be prevented and lives can be saved by using open source data, which is absent because the same government that reports the deaths is responsible for the violence, she said.
17,100 deaths not reported between 1980 and 2018
The study took into account three non-governmental, open-source databases on police violence. These were: Fatal Encounters, Mapping Police Violence, and The Counted, which were compared to NVSS data.
Pieces of information were gathered from news reports and public records requests in the database. The study highlights the extent to which cases of fatal police violence are under-reported, and how police violence disproportionately affects black, Hispanic, and indigenous people in the United States.
From 1980–2018, police violence in the United States resulted in a total of 30,800 deaths, of which 17,100 deaths, of all races and states in the United States, were not recorded in NVSS data. Researchers estimated fatal police violence cases in the United States for the year 2019 using prediction models, and found that there were 1,190 deaths due to police violence that year, increasing to 32,000 from 1980-2019.
According to the analysis, about 60 percent of fatal police violence cases among black Americans were misclassified in the NVSS. Of the 9,540 fatal police violence cases among black Americans, 5,670 were unreported. The study found that the rate of police violence had increased by 38 percent from 1980 to 2010.
Non-Hispanic white people, non-Hispanic people of other races, and Hispanic people of any race, the percentage of deaths due to police violence were 56 percent, 33 percent, and 50 percent, respectively, all of which were not included in the NVSS data. Were.
Men of any race or ethnicity experienced higher rates of death due to police violence than women. From 1980 to 2019, there were 30,600 deaths among males and 1,420 among females.
The researchers point out that open-source data-collection initiatives should be used more to document inequalities in police violence based on race, ethnicity and gender and prevent loss of life.
The researchers point out that many cases of deaths are not classified as incidents caused by police violence because too many physicians and medical examiners are embedded within police departments, resulting in substantial conflicts of interest. Better reporting requires better training, clear instructions on how to document such deaths, and management of these medical examiners’ conflicts of interest.
However, the researchers note that nonfatal injuries attributed to police violence are not addressed in the paper. They point out that such injuries should be examined in future studies to properly understand the full burden of police violence in the United States.
Residents harmed by military police in the United States, police violence in United States territories, and police motions killed by civilians are not included in the data. The researchers conducted the analysis with the help of death certificates, which is a drawback because they only allow binary designation of gender, thereby not identifying cis-gender people. As a result, disproportionately high rates of violence against trans people, particularly Black trans people, were not known.
The Lancet editorial noted that the study will improve national estimates of police violence deaths as it incorporates non-governmental open-source data to correct NVSS data. Because of drugs and homelessness, marginalized groups are more likely to be criminals.
“The strategy to reduce deaths from police violence must include the demilitarization of police forces, but with broader calls to demilitarize society, for example, restricting access to firearms… More responsibility must be taken for the injuries and deaths associated with the pandemic. Such changes are long overdue,” the editorial said.
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