Date

August 5, 2019

Contact: Morgan Sherburne morganls@umich.edu

ANN ARBOR—For young men of color in the United States, police use-of-force is among the leading causes of death, according to a study from the University of Michigan, Rutgers University and Washington University.

Police use-of-force—which includes asphyxiation, beating, a chemical agent, a medical emergency, a Taser, or a gunshot—trails accidental death, suicide, other homicides, heart disease and cancer as a leading cause of death for young black men, who have the highest risk of being killed by police.

About 100 in 100,000 black men and boys will be killed by police during their lives, while 39 white men and boys per 100,000 are killed by police. This means black men are about 2.5 times more likely to be killed by police than white men.

“It’s a striking number,” said study co-author Michael Esposito, a postdoctoral researcher in the Survey Research Center at the U-M Institute for Social Research. “There have been arguments about how widespread of a problem this is. We didn’t have a good estimate about whether it’s a few cases that received a lot of media attention.

“This study shows us that police killings are deeply systematic, with race, gender and age patterning this excess cause of death.”

The study uses data from a database called Fatal Encounters, a journalist-led effort to document deaths involving police. Deaths are gathered and categorized using news reports and public records. The researchers focused on deaths that involved police use-of-force but did not consider other causes of death, such as vehicular collision, suicide, overdose or a fall.

Image credit: Chloe Oliva

“What motivated this study was a big gap in what was available in terms of basic estimates of how likely people are to be killed by police,” said lead author Frank Edwards, assistant professor at Rutgers’ School of Criminal Justice.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics keeps a database on arrest-related deaths, but the database relies on self-reported incidents from police departments, Edwards says.

Another governmental database, the National Vital Statistics Report, archived by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, tallies deaths related to legal intervention, but researchers have found that cases in which police are responsible for deaths are undercounted by about 50%.

The study also shows that other minority groups are at high risk for death by police use-of-force—in particular, American Indian/Alaska Native (55 per 100,000) and Latino (53 per 100,000) men and boys.

Women are about 20 times less likely to be killed by police, according to the research. Latina and Asian/Pacific Islander women are less likely than white women to be killed by police, but black women and American Indian/Alaska Native women face a higher risk. In fact, American Indian and Alaska Native women are up to twice as likely to be killed by police than white women.

“Because a lot of our talk about this in public spaces is focused on black men, we sometimes lose sight of other groups with elevated risk,” U-M’s Esposito said. “Conversations around who’s most at risk have to incorporate the diversity and intersectionality highlighted in this study, fleshing out our narratives of why individuals with particular social traits have more or less exposure to police violence.”

For the study, the researchers did not include deaths that occurred because of car chases or accidents. Had they, risk of death for all groups of women would have doubled.

“I think that our results really underscore that police killings are a lot more common than we might have imagined,” said study co-author Hedwig Lee, professor of sociology at Washington University in St. Louis. “Our work also provides more evidence that people of color, particularly African American men and women, but also American/Indian and Alaska Native women are at risk.”

Now that these risks have been documented, researchers’ next task is to get a better understanding of what drives these patterns, Lee says.

More information:

Study (PDF): Risk of being killed by police use of force in the United States by age, race–ethnicity, and sex

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4547877&forum_id=2#40318531)

Sounds like systemic sexism to me.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4547877&forum_id=2#40322928)

One would think the reasonable concern is why the police are killing so many men, but apparently that's not the real injustice.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4547877&forum_id=2#40323042)

how many are murdered by other black men?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4547877&forum_id=2#40323377)

Other homicides are #3

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4547877&forum_id=2#40323419)

it is not young men and boys, but i am betting goes up to 39 or higher.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4547877&forum_id=2#40323519)

"Does the criminal justice system treat African-Americans fairly?

I always assumed it obviously didn’t. Then a while ago I read this harshly polemical but research-filled article claiming to prove it did. Then I found a huge review paper on the subject, written by a Harvard professor of sociology, which concluded after analyzing sixty pages of exquisitely-researched studies that:

'Recognizing that research on criminal justice processing in the United States is complex and fraught with methodological problems, the weight of the evidence reviewed suggests the following. When restricted to index crimes, dozens of individual-level studies have shown that a simple direct influence of race on pretrial release, plea bargaining, conviction, sentence length, and the death penalty among adults is small to nonexistent once legally relevant variables (e.g. prior record) are controlled. For these crimes, racial differentials in sanctioning appear to match the large racial differences in criminal offending. Findings on the processing of adult index crimes therefore generally support the non-discrimination thesis.'

"Once again, there are two possible hypotheses here: either police are biased, or black people actually commit these crimes at higher rates than other groups.

The second hypothesis has been strongly supported by crime victimization surveys, which show that the percent of arrestees who are black matches very closely matches the percent of victims who say their assailant was black. This has been constant throughout across thirty years of crime victmization surveys."

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/25/race-and-justice-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4547877&forum_id=2#40326997)

What data did they use to figure death by police? The stats that I have seen show hat fewer than 250 blacks per year are killed by police shootings. The other listed forms of death strike me as incredibly rare, and in the case of 'medical emergency,' dubious as well. I have to make an assumption here so I will be generous to the other side and assume that "asphyxiation, beating, a chemical agent, a medical emergency, [and] a Taser," taken together, contribute as many deaths as by shooting. That would be 1,000 deaths per year.

How does ~1,000 deaths per year get to "100 in 100,000"? A quick search of the population of black men under age 39 in the USA put the number at around 11 million. In order to get to this number, libs would have to find approximately 110,000 black men under age 39 who have been killed by police and this is plainly impossible when using the publicly available data.

The second point about this data is that it limits the pool to "black men and boys," which removes deaths attributable to the most common causes, i.e. heart attack, cancer, natural causes, etc. The vast majority of any given population lives well past the age of 40, and the vast majority of deaths for any given population occur after the age of 40. In fact the vast majority of deaths do not happen until much, much later than the age of 40. So by framing it this way the study hits the high-water mark of "death by police," and even then it's sixth.

Third point is how the data is presented. They say it is the sixth leading cause and although I doubt that very much for reasons stated, by presenting it in this way they gloss over the rate differences between causes 1-5 and cause #6. Actually on this point I will acknowledge a point, I am quite impressed at how they use regular cadence to *totally gloss over* "other homicides' which is the third leading cause of death. Gee I wonder the rate difference between "other homicide" and 'death by police' is? It's probably a factor of 10 or more, but you wouldn't know that from how the data is presented - one is third and the other is sixth.

Last point is that the "death by police" statistic says nothing about the circumstances of those deaths. Were the ones killed in process of a violent crime? Were they armed? Were they the instigators of the police interaction which led to their death? This should matter in any civilized discussion about the issue that has been raised.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4547877&forum_id=2#40327235)

Lol jk I'm sure they didnt.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4547877&forum_id=2#40327255)