Deaths From US Police Violence Undercounted

The American public is already familiar with the rampant police brutality that is happening all across the country.

According to a September 04, 2019 feature “What the data say about police shootings” in the journal Nature, police officers fatally shoot about three people per day on average, a number that’s close to the yearly totals for other developed nations. This is the United States of America alright! 

But here’s another damning fact. Most deaths from police violence in the United States over the past four decades have been undercounted in the federal government main database, according to a study conducted by University of Washington researchers and published in The Lancet. 

The US National Vital Statistics System recorded police violence as playing a role in 13,700 deaths from 1980 to 2018, the study’s authors said. But by examining three non-governmental, open-source databases, they estimated the true total was more than 30,800, or 55.5 percent of those killed by police. 

The study noted that the undercounting was highest for non-Hispanic Black Americans, at 59.5 percent; followed by 56.1 percent for non-Hispanic white people and; 50 percent for Hispanic people – raising questions about how race affects medical examiners and coroners record deaths. 

It also found that Black Americans are 3.5 times more likely to be killed by police than white Americans. 

The study is one of the most comprehensive examinations ever of police violence in the US, and comes after widespread protests broke out across the country in 2020 following the high-profile killings by police of unarmed Black people, including George Floyd who died after a police officer knelt on his neck for more than eight minutes.