More Than Half Of US Police Killings Are Not Reported: Study Of 40-Year-Data Finds

Between 1980 & 2018, 30,800 deaths occurred in US due to police violence, but 17,100 deaths were not reported. Study in The Lancet also says Black Americans most likely to see fatal police violence

Representational image of the US Police | Photo: Getty

New Delhi: More than 55 per cent of deaths from police violence in America between 1980 and 2018 were unreported or misclassified in the US National Vital Statistics System (NVSS), a new study published in The Lancet has found. 

The study also found that Black Americans were estimated to be 3.5 times more likely to experience fatal police violence than white Americans, and have the highest death rates from police violence. 

The new study is one of the longest study periods to date to address this topic, The Lancet said in a statement.

More than 17,000 deaths occuring due to police violence were not accurately reported or classified by the NVSS, the government system that assembles all death certificates in the USA, researchers estimate. 

Fablina Sharara, co-lead author of the study, said worldwide attention has been recently drawn towards high-profile police killings of Black people, which she said is an urgent public health crisis. 

Sharara added that the extent of the crisis cannot be completely understood without reliable data, and that systematic racism persistent in many US institutions, including law enforcement, is obscured due to inaccurate reporting or misclassification of the deaths of Black Americans as a result of police violence. Police violence can be prevented and lives saved using open-sourced data, which is absent because the same government which reports deaths is responsible for the violence, she said.

17,100 Deaths Were Not Reported Between 1980 And 2018 

Three non-governmental, open-source databases on police violence were taken into consideration in this study. These were: Fatal Encounters, Mapping Police Violence, and The Counted, which were compared to NVSS data. 

Pieces of information from news reports and public record requests were assembled in the databases. The study highlights the extent to which cases of fatal police violence are underreported, and how police violence disproportionately affects the Black, Hispanic and Indigenous people in the USA.

A total of 30,800 deaths from police violence occured in the USA, from 1980-2018, of which 17,100 deaths, across all races and states in the USA, were not reported in the NVSS data. The researchers estimated the cases of fatal police violence in the USA, for the year 2019, using a predictive model, and found that 1,190 deaths occured in that year due to police violence, increasing the number to 32,000, from 1980-2019.

Around 60 per cent of the cases of fatal police violence in Black Americans were misclassified in the NVSS, according to the analysis. Out of 9,540 fatal police violence cases in Black Americans, 5,670 were unreported. There was a 38 per cent increase in rates of police violence from the 1980s to the 2010s, the study found.

The percentages of deaths occuring in non-Hispanic white people, non-Hispanic people of other races, and Hispanic peo,any race, due to police violence were 56 per cent, 33 per cent, and 50 per cent, respectively, all of which were not included in the NVSS data.

Men of any race or ethnicity experienced higher rates of death due to police violence, compared to women. From 1980 to 2019, there were 30,600 deaths in men and 1,420 deaths in women.

The researchers explain that open-source data-collection initiatives should be used more so that disparities in police violence by race, ethnicity, and gender are documented, and the loss of life can be prevented.

Many cases of deaths are not classified as occuring due to police violence because a lot of physicians and medical examiners are embedded within police departments, which results in substantial conflicts of interest, the researchers explain. Improved training, clearer instructions on how to document such deaths, and management of these conflicts of interest for these medical examiners are necessary for improved reporting.

The researchers, however, noted that non-fatal injuries attributed to police violence are not addressed in the paper. They explain that such injuries should be examined in future studies in order to properly understand the full burden of police violence in the USA.

Residents who may have been harmed by military police in the USA, police violence in USA territories, and police offers 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 allow only a binary designation of gender, leading to cis-gender people not being identified. As a result, the disproportionately high rates of violence against trans people, especially Black trans people, were not known. 

The Lancet editorial mentions that the study will improve national estimates of fatalities from police violence because it has incorporated non-governmental open-source data to correct NVSS data. Due to drugs and homelessness, marginalised groups are more likely to be criminalised. 

"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,” the editorial said.