Story at a glance:
- Researchers found that government data misclassified nearly 60 percent of all fatal police encounters involving Black Americans.
- More than 50 percent of deaths between 1980 and 2018, a total of 17,000 people, were misclassified or did not get properly reported.
- Black people are 3.5 times more likely than white people to be killed by the police.
An officer killing a Black person and it being unnoticed or incorrectly filed is common in American policing, according to peer reviewed research published in the journal Lancet by the University of Washington School of Medicine’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, The Guardian reported.
America is changing faster than ever! Add Changing America to your Facebook or Twitter feed to stay on top of the news.
More than 50 percent of deaths between 1980 and 2018, a total of 17,000 people, were misclassified or did not get properly reported, the study found.
The data also show that Black people are 3.5 times more likely than white people to be killed by police.
“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, told The Guardian.
To gauge how official figures are measuring this issue, the researchers compared data in the U.S. National Vital Statistics System (NVSS), a government database, with non-governmental, open-source databases that track police brutality dating back to the 1960s. They found that the NVSS misclassified nearly 60 percent of all fatal police encounters involving Black Americans.
The NVSS also missed “approximately 50% of all police-involved deaths of Hispanic people, 56% of all police-involved deaths of non-Hispanic white people, and 33% of deaths involving non-Hispanic people across other races,” The Guardian reported.
A beacon of hope, The Washington Post reported, is that police killing of Black people is starting to receive more attention after the police killing of George Floyd, whose death captured by a bystander sparked outage and a global protest during a pandemic.
READ MORE STORIES FROM CHANGING AMERICA
EXTREMELY RARE ORANGE LOBSTER SAVED FROM GROCERY STORE
FAUCI GRILLED AND PRESSED TO RESIGN ON CONTROVERSIAL TALK SHOW
NASA REPORTS MULTIPLE FIREBALLS HURTLING THROUGH THE SKY OVER US
MAN DROWNS WITH WINNING LOTTERY TICKET
AMERICAN AIRLINES PASSENGER CLIMBS ONTO WING OF PLANE AS IT TAXIS ON RUNWAY
changing america copyright.
