More than 55% of deaths from police violence in the USA from 1980-2018 were misclassified or unreported in official vital statistics reports according to a new study in The Lancet. The highest rate of deaths from police violence occurred for Black Americans, who were estimated to be 3.5 times more likely to experience fatal police violence than white Americans.
Researchers estimate that the US National Vital Statistics System (NVSS), the government system that collates all death certificates in the USA, failed to accurately classify and report more than 17,000 deaths as being caused by police violence during the 40-year study period.
“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. Inaccurately reporting or misclassifying these deaths further obscures the larger issue of systemic racism that is embedded in many US institutions, including law enforcement. Currently, the same government responsible for this violence is also responsible for reporting on it. Open-sourced data is a more reliable and comprehensive resource to help inform policies that can prevent police violence and save lives,” says co-lead author Fablina Sharara of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), University of Washington School of Medicine, USA. [1]
To examine the extent of under-reporting, researchers compared NVSS data to three non-governmental, open-source databases on police violence: Fatal Encounters, Mapping Police Violence, and The Counted [2]. These databases collate information from news reports and public record requests. When compared, the researchers’ new estimates highlight the extent to which deaths from police violence are under-reported in the NVSS and the disproportionate effect of police violence on Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous people in the USA.
Across all races and states in the USA, researchers estimate that NVSS data failed to report 17,100 deaths from police violence out of 30,800 total deaths from 1980-2018 (the most recent years of available NVSS data), accounting for 55.5% of all deaths from police violence during this period. Using a predictive model, researchers also estimated the total number of deaths from police violence in the USA, for all races/ethnicities and all states for 2019, estimating an additional 1,190 deaths, bringing the total number of deaths from police violence from 1980-2019 to 32,000.
Black Americans experienced fatal police violence at a rate 3.5 times higher than white Americans, according to this analysis, with nearly 60% of these deaths misclassified in the NVSS (5,670 unreported deaths from police violence out of 9,540 estimated deaths). From the 1980s to the 2010s, rates of police violence increased by 38% for all races (with 0.25 deaths from police violence per 100,000 person-years in the 1980s as compared to 0.34 deaths from police violence per 100,000 person-years in the 2010s).
Compared to the deaths recorded in the new analysis, NVSS also missed 56% (8,540 deaths out of 15,200) of deaths of non-Hispanic white people, 33% (281 deaths out of 861) of non-Hispanic people of other races, and 50% (2,580 deaths out of 5,170) of Hispanic people of any race.
Deaths due to police violence were significantly higher for men of any race or ethnicity than women, with 30,600 deaths in men and 1,420 deaths in women from 1980 to 2019.
Previous studies covering shorter time periods have found similar rates of racial disparities, as well as significant under-reporting of police killings in official statistics. This new study is one of the longest study periods to date to address this topic.
The authors call for increased use of open-source data-collection initiatives to allow researchers and policymakers to document and highlight disparities in police violence by race, ethnicity, and gender, allowing for targeted, meaningful changes to policing and public safety that will prevent loss of life.
Additionally, the researchers point out that because many medical examiners or coroners are embedded within police departments, there can be substantial conflicts of interest that could disincentivize certifiers from indicating police violence as a cause of death. Managing these conflicts of interest in addition to improved training and clearer instructions for physicians and medical examiners on how to document police violence in text fields on death certificates could improve reporting and reduce omissions and implicit biases that cause misclassifications.
“Our recommendation to utilize open-source data collection is only a first step. As a community we need to do more. Efforts to prevent police violence and address systemic racism in the USA, including body cameras that record interactions of police with civilians along with de-escalation training and implicit bias training for police officers, for example, have largely been ineffective. As our data show, fatal police violence rates and the large racial disparities in police killings have either remained the same or increased over the years. Policymakers should look to other countries, such Norway and the UK, where police forces have been de-militarized and use evidence-based strategies to find effective solutions that prioritize public safety and community-based interventions to reduce fatal police violence,” says co-lead author Eve Wool of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), University of Washington School of Medicine, USA. [1]
The authors acknowledge some limitations in the study. This paper does not calculate or address non-fatal injuries attributed to police violence, which is critical to understanding the full burden of police violence in the USA and should be examined in future studies. The data also do not include police officers killed by civilians, police violence in USA territories, or residents who may have been harmed by military police in the USA or abroad. Because the researchers relied on death certificates, which only allow for a binary designation of sex, they were unable to identify non-cisgender people, potentially masking the disproportionately high rates of violence against trans people, particularly Black trans people. The authors note that the intersectionality of gender, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, and other identities and the relationship to fatal police violence should be studied in the future.
A Lancet Editorial adds, “The study is a potential turning point for improving national estimates of fatalities from police violence by incorporating non-governmental open-source data to correct NVSS data…Better data is one aspect of a public health approach; introducing harm-reduction policies is another. Policing in the USA follows models of hostile, racialised interactions between civilians and armed agents of the state. Marginalised groups are more likely to be criminalized through the war on drugs or homelessness. Reducing hostile or violent interactions between police and civilians, particularly those who are most vulnerable overall, is a forceful case for investment in other areas of community-based health and support systems, including housing, food access, substance use treatment, and emergency medical services. Strategies to lower fatalities from police violence must include demilitarisation of police forces, but with the broader call to demilitarize society by, for example, restricting access to firearms…Police forces too must take greater responsibility for police-involved injuries and deaths. Such changes are long overdue.”
NOTES TO EDITORS
This study was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the National Institute of Minority Health and Health Disparities, and the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. A full list of authors and institutions is available in the paper.
The labels have been added to this press release as part of a project run by the Academy of Medical Sciences seeking to improve the communication of evidence. For more information, please see: http://www.sciencemediacentre.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/AMS-press-release-labelling-system-GUIDANCE.pdf if you have any questions or feedback, please contact The Lancet press office pressoffice@lancet.com
[1] Quote direct from author and cannot be found in the text of the Article.
[2]Fatal encounters: https://fatalencounters.org/; Mapping police Violence: mappingpoliceviolence.org; The Counted: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/series/counted-us-police-killings
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METHOD OF RESEARCH
Observational study
SUBJECT OF RESEARCH
People
ARTICLE TITLE
Fatal police violence by race and state in the USA, 1980–2019: a network meta-regression
ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE
30-Sep-2021
COI STATEMENT
M Mahmoudi is the co-founder and director of the Academic Parity Movement, a non-profit organisation dedicated to addressing academic discrimination, violence and incivility. K M Mehta reports leadership or fiduciary role in board, society, committee, or advocacy group, paid or unpaid, with the Youth Community Service as a board member, outside the submitted work. J A Singh reports consulting fees from Crealta/ Horizon, Medisys, Fidia, Two Labs, Adept Field Solutions, Clinical Care options, Clearview Healthcare Partners, Putnam Associates, Focus Forward, Navigant Consulting, Spherix, MedIQ, UBM LLC, Trio Health, Medscape, WebMD, and Practice Point Communications, and the National Institutes of Health and the American College of Rheumatology; payment or honoraria for lectures, presentations, speakers bureaus, manuscript writing, or educational events from Simply Speaking; support for attending meetings or travel from OMERACT, an international organisation that develops measures for clinical trials and receives arm’s length funding from 12 pharmaceutical companies, when traveling bi-annually to OMERACT meetings; leadership or fiduciary role in other board, society, committee or advocacy group, paid or unpaid, with OMERACT as a member of the steering committee, with the US Food and Drug Administration Arthritis Advisory Committee, with the Veterans Affairs Rheumatology Field Advisory Committee as a member, and with the UAB Cochrane Musculoskeletal Group Satellite Center on Network Meta-analysis as a director and editor; stock or stock options in TPT Global Tech, Vaxart Pharmaceuticals, and Charlotte’s Web Holdings; and previously owned stock options in Amarin, Viking, and Moderna, all outside the submitted work.
In my mind, I visualized them returning to their workplaces, creating reports that oddly did not contain information about support. Their responses were, “Well, he did not ask.” It was because he did not know. It was the same when we returned to the United States and I approached the Veterans Administration for support for my husband. The physician’s assistant, who turned out to be the third worst person on the planet, asked, “So what do you want from the VA?” My reply was. “Support for my husband.” I told him what was going on with him. For twenty minutes, this man focused on activities on his computer. For months, I heard nothing. I returned for another reason and met someone who was mortified by how I was treated. We had a discussion. Because of this woman, who I learned was ill and took leave after, my husband received what he needed.
The bottom line is what you don’t know, you don’t know. I think the best question to ask is, “What don’t I know that I need to know?” It can be asked in meditation. If asked of another human being, discern who can respond in a way that supports. Libraries and databases are accessible and should be reviewed periodically because programs change. There is a lot of support made available by law – local, state, and federal. Black people have been and continue to be excluded from benefits. Keep mining. Dig until you cannot dig any further.
