Much police violence goes unreported
Study finds killings can wind up misclassified
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.
More than 55% of deaths from police violence from 1980 to 2018 were misclassified or unreported in official vital statistics reports, according to the peerreviewed 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.
17,100 deaths
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.
“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,” 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, 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,” Sharara said.
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.
From the 1980s to the 2010s, rates of police violence increased by 38% for all races, researchers found.
“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,” Eve Wool, a lead author and a researcher at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, said in the release.
Wool said efforts to prevent police violence and address systemic racism in the U.S., such as body-worn cameras and de-escalation and implicit bias training for officers have “largely been ineffective.”
The top five states with the highest underreporting rates were Oklahoma, Wyoming, Alabama, Louisiana and Nebraska, the researchers found. The states with the highest mortality rate of police violence were Oklahoma, Washington, D.C., Arizona, Alaska, Nevada and Wyoming.
Deaths due to police violence were significantly higher for men than women, with 30,600 deaths in men and 1,420 deaths in women from 1980 to 2019, according to researchers.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, part of the National Vital Statistics System, did not immediately respond to the request for comment.
‘Substantial conflicts of interest’
The researchers suggested the underreporting is related to “several factors” and offered solutions for collecting more accurate data and, ultimately, eliminating police violence.
Part of the issue may be clerical, the researchers said.
The coroner or medical examiner may fail to indicate police involvement in a death certificate’s cause of death section or make errors in the process of assigning certain codes, the researchers said.
Some coroners and medical examiners may also feel “substantial conflicts of interest” that disincentivize them from indicating law enforcement involvement in a death, as many work for or are embedded within police departments and many feel political or occupational pressure to disguise police culpability.
The researchers cited a 2011 survey of National Association of Medical Examiners members that found 22% of respondents reported having been pressured by an elected official or appointee to change cause or manner of death on a certificate.
Improved training and clearer instructions on how to document police violence on death certificates could improve reporting, the researchers said. They also suggested forensic pathologists should work independently from law enforcement and should be awarded whistleblower protections under the law.
“Currently, the same government responsible for this violence is also responsible for reporting on it,” Sharara said. “Open-sourced data is a more reliable and comprehensive resource to help inform policies that can prevent police violence and save lives.”
The researchers said America’s history of systemic racism and militarized police forces underlie the high rates of police violence in the U.S.
“To respond to this public health crisis, the USA must replace militarised policing with evidenced-based support for communities, prioritize the safety of the public, and value Black lives,” the researchers wrote.
The researchers noted 19 nations, including Norway and the United Kingdom, do not arm police officers or only arm select officers.
“The difference these practices have on loss of life is staggering: no one died from police violence in Norway in 2019, and three people were recorded to have died in England and Wales from police violence between 2018 and 2019,” the researchers wrote.
The researchers said the study has multiple limitations. The study did not calculate nonfatal injuries attributed to police violence, police violence in U.S. territories, or residents who may have been harmed by military police in the U.S. or abroad. And every state was missing some ethnic data.
The researchers also noted their approach relied on data from death certificates, which only allow for a binary designation of sex.
The approach, the researchers said, erases the existence of noncisgender people and masks the disproportionately high rates of police violence against transgender people, particularly Black transgender people.
The study was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities and the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.