Your State's Signature Cause of Death

[Donald Ian Rankin]

7. No, you've completely misunderstood this map

"To make the map (published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention earlier this week), Francis P. Boscoe and Eva Pradhan, both at the New York State Department of Health, took data from 2001 to 2010 and calculated state rates of death for each of the 113 causes tracked by the CDC. They then divided those answers by the national rates of death for those specific causes. As Tech Times pointed out, the most distinctive cause doesn't necessarily mean high numbers. Rather, the map shows a cause of death for each state that occurs at higher rates than in the rest of the country."

There are no states where cops are anywhere near the leading cause of death, and I'm slightly worried that that wouldn't be immediately obvious.

What there are are states where the *ratio* of number of people killed by law enforcement intervention to the national average is greater than for any of the other 112 causes of death. Many of those other 112 will be commoner in that state, but they'll also be commoner nationwide, so the ratio will not be as large.

Which is quite interesting, because it implies that some law enforcement agencies are killing far fewer people than others, and it might be worth looking at sharing best practice (although obviously local crime rates will be a very large part of the variance), but it doesn't tell you anything about the relative frequencies of death by law enforcement intervention to death by tuberculosis or gun accident.