More than 17,000 deaths caused by police have been misclassified since 1980

[WhiskeyGrinder]

https://www.npr.org/2021/10/01/1041989880/deaths-caused-by-police-misclassified

Deaths involving police have been greatly undercounted in the United States, and African American people die in such encounters at 3.5 times the rate of whites, according to a new analysis by public health researchers.

In an article published Thursday in the medical journal The Lancet, researchers found that deaths from police violence between 1980 and 2018 were misclassified by 55.5% in the U.S. National Vital Statistics System, which tracks information from death certificates.

"For most causes of death, the death certificate filled out by a physician is sort of the gold standard," says Chris Murray of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, who is one of the study's authors. But he says that in this area, the certificates seem to fall short. "There is a pretty systematic underrecording of police violence deaths. "

That realization isn't entirely new. After the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., news organizations started to keep their own tallies of police-related deaths, which turned out to be higher than the government's numbers.

[niyad]

1. NSS

[WhiskeyGrinder]

3. ?

[niyad]

4. No s*** Sherlock. Self-evident.

[Wounded Bear]

5. "No shit, Sherlock" I assume...

[IrishAfricanAmerican]

2. K&R

[Hugh_Lebowski]

6. The article does raise an interesting (and perhaps important) question about the research

The article also highlights the disparity in the mortality rate for African-Americans, which it says is 3.5 times higher than that of whites.

The article suggests the disparity is caused by "systemic racism in policing," but it doesn't specify how that happens. Specifically, it doesn't address whether police are more likely to use lethal force against African-Americans or whether nonpolicing factors lead African-Americans to have more encounters with police.

Does this mean that 'in ANY given encounter between a police officer and members of the public, there's a 3.5X greater chance that you die in that particular encounter ... if you're AA'

IOW, if you're white there's, say, a .2% chance you die in any random police encounter, but if you're black there's a .7% chance?

Or does it mean that, say, 200 white people per year are killed by cops, and 700 black folks are killed by cops?

Or does it mean that 200 white people are killed by cops, but since whites outnumber blacks by (say) 5X, you'd expect 40 blacks to be killed if the numbers were 'fair' ... but instead we see 3.5*40 = 140 blacks killed?

I'd imagine there's other ways that "mortality rate for African-Americans, which it says is 3.5 times higher than that of whites" might be interpreted as well, but that elude me at the moment.

Obviously none of these, if true, are acceptable. I just get frustrated by ambiguity of this sort. Pet peeve I guess you'd say.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

7. From the paper:

Across all races and states in the USA, we estimate 30 800 deaths (95% uncertainty interval [UI] 30 300–31 300) from police violence between 1980 and 2018; this represents 17 100 more deaths (16 600–17 600) than reported by the NVSS. Over this time period, the age-standardised mortality rate due to police violence was highest in non-Hispanic Black people (0·69 [95% UI 0·67–0·71] per 100 000), followed by Hispanic people of any race (0·35 [0·34–0·36]), non-Hispanic White people (0·20 [0·19–0·20]), and non-Hispanic people of other races (0·15 [0·14– 0·16])

[Hugh_Lebowski]

8. Thanks! So basically it's the third option.

So roughly 1 in every 145,000 black people can expect to die as a result of the police killing them, but only 1 in every 500,000 non-Hispanic whites can expect the same.

At least, in an age-standardized sense. I wonder how age-standardization works? Does an 18 yo being killed 'count' more or less than a 65 yo?

It's pretty damning stuff if accurate. Knowing the rate-per-encounter could also be illuminating but probably not nearly as easy to get ahold of the needed data.

I do wonder though the degree to which (if any) there could be something of a vicious cycle involved here. By that I mean, AA folks are pretty keenly aware that the police are a threat to their physical survival ... does that awareness foster a stronger 'self defense' instinct, such that overal blacks folks are slightly more likely to 'fight back', physically?

I'm NOT saying that IF that were the case, that's 'wrong of them', to be very clear ... but I do wonder if the mutual mistrust might not be creating a kind of horrible, self-sustaining cycle.