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| The SRG (Strategic Response Group) of the NYPD using the LRAD to give announcements. Popular Mechanics |
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Police Violence Deaths Are Twice As High As Official U.S. Count
Bloomberg
October 11, 2021
More men died of police violence than of testicular cancer, or lymphoma, or STDs in the US in 2019. Depending on where you get your information, that could come as a surprise, or a grave confirmation.
A new study published in The Lancet found that a government-run database has undercounted the number of deaths at the hands of police in the U.S. by more than half.
That’s unacceptable, said Fablina Sharara, one of the lead authors of the report and a researcher for the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington. “We rely on official statistics for every other cause of death: for cancer, for example, or homicide,” she said. “From our perspective, it's important for the official statistics to be accurate for every cause.”
They found that the official U.S. count of causes of death, produced by the National Vital Statistics System (NVSS), likely didn’t represent 55.5% of the true total deaths from police violence that occurred over four decades. The actual number of police deaths was 30,800 between 1980 and 2018, researchers estimated.
The undercount was most pronounced among non-Hispanic Black victims, who had the highest mortality rate: Of an estimated 9,500 deaths, only around 3,800 were officially logged.
“When you undercount, you’re now scientifically making it nearly impossible to make good policy decisions,” said Edwin G. Lindo, the assistant dean for Social & Health Justice at the University of Washington School of Medicine, who reviewed the findings of the study. “When you are undercounting an individual who had a fatal encounter with police, you are now effectively erasing the historical fact of what was their death and how it occurred.”
The fact that the government has been undercounting police-involved deaths is not a new revelation: Over the last few years, several news outlets and independent organizations started their own alternative databases precisely to address this problem and determine the true scope of police violence. These open source projects have depended on news reports, crowdsourcing and other research that includes coroners’ diagnoses or official death records obtained by public records requests. Despite the evidence from these projects that government sources had deficient information, the NVSS rate of underreporting has changed little over time, researchers said.
The new study documents the extent of that cumulative undercount over several decades, and points the way to creating a more centralized and transparent national resource that follows some of the standards open source projects have created.
The three databases the researchers studied, Mapping Police Violence, Fatal Encounters and The Guardian’s The Counted, only collectively hosted data covering 2000 to 2019, and used different metrics to classify what factors police played in violence. The Guardian’s program has already ended, its methodology was considered by researchers to be the gold standard, in spite of its relatively short duration. So, using a predictive model that applied similar methods across decades, researchers established a model to estimate the scale of deadly police violence.
Discrepancies in the official count can be driven by a variety of factors, many of which are influenced by racial bias, researchers say. Often, the coroners or medical examiners who first identify cause of death are embedded within police departments or consult with law enforcement, which researchers say could introduce conflicts of interest. They’re also typically elected or appointed: If police unions are donating to their campaigns, Lindo posits, that could introduce a financial incentive that skews accurate accounting.
“One way to mitigate that is for medical examiners or coroners to have more independence from those departments,” said Eve Wool, another lead author on the report and a researcher for the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.
Training matters, too: Sometimes, police-involved deaths are miscategorized as homicides or suicides, in part because there’s no standardized process to ask about if — and how — a police officer was involved in the death.
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