A new study published by the peer-reviewed journal Lancet found that more than half of the police-involved killings that have occurred over the last 40 years have gone unreported.
The data collected by researchers at the University of Washington School of Medicine’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation found that over 55 percent of police-involved deaths between the years 1980 and 2018, which was totaled over 17,000 casualties, were either misclassified or unreported.
The study also found that Black Americans are more likely to die due to police violence than any other group. They are 3.5 times more likely than white Americans.
Fablina Sharara, a researcher at the University of Washington School of Medicine and co-lead author of the study, called it a “public health crisis,” telling The Guardian, “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.”
Researchers compared data from a government database called the U.S. National Vital Statistics System (NVSS), which tracks the U.S. population, with open-source databases, such as news reports and public record requests that offer a broader scope of police brutality.
The study found that the NVSS database misclassified almost 60 percent of the incidents in which police officers killed Black Americans and nearly 50 percent of the incidents in which officers killed Hispanic people.
“Inaccurately reporting or misclassifying these deaths further obscures the larger issue of systemic racism that is embedded in many U.S. institutions, including law enforcement,” Sharara explained.
