New US Police Brutality Discrepancies Revealed in Official Records
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Research conducted by the University of Washington, Seattle, reports that more than half of US police violence cases were either unreported or misclassified in official records.
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Protesters are arrested by police during a demonstration in Louisville, Kentucky, September 23, 2020 (CFP)
Research conducted by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation of the University of Washington, Seattle, and published in The Lancet reported that 55% of deaths by US police violence between 1980 and 2018 were either unreported or misclassified.
Researchers found that the US National Vital Statistics System only reported 13,700 deaths resulting from police violence, meaning the NVSS omitted 17,100 deaths attributable to police violence.
Researchers also identified disparities in the total number of police brutality deaths reported in the NVSS, citing non-firearm injuries and missing or misclassified information on the individual's race or ethnicity as the main reason behind said disparities.
Age-standardized mortality was higher in Black people and non-Hispanic Black people than White people, showing the discriminatory policy followed by the US police toward certain races and ethnicities. Black Americans were estimated to be 3.5 times more likely than white Americans to be victims of police brutality.
The researchers urged the police forces to take greater responsibility, saying such changes are overdue. This is seen more than a year after protests broke out across the United States over the death of George Floyd, a black American who was murdered at the hands of a police officer who kneeled on his neck for over 8 minutes, begging for his life as he took his last breath.
Floyd's death sparked a series of protests that also displayed police brutality and systemic racism. Furthermore, the police assaulted and detained hundreds of protestors, also killing a number of black men and women.
