Police earning the hate
Posted: Fri Oct 01, 2021 10:18 pm
More than half of police killings in the US are unreported in government data, study finds
https://news.yahoo.com/more-half-police ... 02158.html
https://news.yahoo.com/more-half-police ... 02158.html
More than half of police killings in the U.S. are not reported in official government data, and Black Americans are most likely to experience fatal police violence, according to a new study released Thursday.
An estimated 55% of deaths from police violence from 1980 to 2018 were misclassified or unreported in official vital statistics reports, according to the peer-reviewed study by a group of more than 90 collaborators in The Lancet, one of the world's oldest and most renowned medical journals.
Previous studies have found similar rates of underreporting, but the new paper is one of the longest study periods to date.
Researchers compared data from the U.S. National Vital Statistics System, an inter-governmental system that collates all death certificates, to three open-source databases on fatal police violence: Fatal Encounters, Mapping Police Violence and The Counted. The databases collect information from news reports and public record requests.
Government data did not report 17,100 deaths from police violence
Researchers estimated official government data did not report 17,100 deaths from police violence out of 30,800 total deaths during the nearly 40-year period, speculating the gap is a result of a mixture of clerical errors and more insidious motivations.
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 misclassified – meaning they are not attributed to police violence – in official government data, researchers found.
Vital statistics reports are often used to inform health policy, and inaccurate data minimizes the problem of police violence and limits the reach of justice and accountability, Fablina Sharara, one of the lead authors and a researcher at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington School of Medicine, told USA TODAY.
"Recent high-profile police killings of Black people have drawn worldwide attention to this urgent public health crisis, but the magnitude of this problem can’t be fully understood without reliable data," Sharara said in a press release. "Inaccurately reporting or misclassifying these deaths further obscures the larger issue of systemic racism that is embedded in many U.S. institutions, including law enforcement."
Government data also misclassified 50% of deaths of Hispanic people, 56% of deaths of non-Hispanic white people and 33% of deaths of non-Hispanic people of other races, researchers found.
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. Non-Hispanic Indigenous people were estimated to be 1.8 times more likely to die from police violence than non-Hispanic white people, the researchers found.
From the 1980s to the 2010s, rates of police violence increased by 38% for all races, researchers found.
Eve Wool, a lead author and a researcher at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, said the rise is evidence that efforts to prevent police violence and address systemic racism, such as body-worn cameras and de-escalation and implicit bias training for officers, have "largely been ineffective."