The level of racial bias in American policing is overwhelming. Today, there is ample evidence to show Black people in the United States are far more likely to die at the hands of police, and the Black Lives Matter movement is calling it an urgent public health crisis.
According to a new study, currently there is no national, publicly-funded system tracking these deaths nationwide, but they can still be measured using public health data, and you can bet independent researchers are counting.
A new analysis of 5,494 police-related fatalities between 2013 and 2017 in the US reveals Black people are, on average, 3.23 times more likely to be killed than White people.
The data comes from a citizen science initiative called Fatal Encounters, which systematically verifies deadly police interactions using paid researchers who comb through online media reports and public records.
The findings are extremely worrisome, and match plenty of other studies. Previous research using this same database revealed 1 in 1,000 Black men can expect to die at the hands of police in their lifetime.
In fact, between 2012 and 2018, US police killed more Black men in their 20s than diabetes, pneumonia, chronic respiratory disease, or cerebrovascular disease.
“In the wake of George Floyd’s death at the hands of the police in Minneapolis and the following surge of protests against police violence, uncovering specific data on police-related fatalities in the US has never been more critical,” the authors of the new analysis write.
Using complex multilevel models, the team estimated the rate of fatal police violence in every Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) in the US.
Comparing the results, it…
