From NPR: More than 17,000 deaths caused by police have been misclassified since 1980
Deaths involving police have been greatly undercounted in the United States, and African American people die in such encounters at 3.5 times the rate of whites, according to a new analysis by public health researchers.
In an article published Thursdayin the medical journal The Lancet, researchers found that deaths from police violence between 1980 and 2018 were misclassified by 55.5% in the U.S. National Vital Statistics System, which tracks information from death certificates.
“For most causes of death, the death certificate filled out by a physician is sort of the gold standard,” says Chris Murray of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, who is one of the study’s authors. But he says that in this area, the certificates seem to fall short. “There is a pretty systematic underrecording of police violence deaths. “
Reading the study, they’re claiming that the cops are/were killing about 1000 people a year.
They’re claiming that the cops killed a LOT more people in 2010(ish) than in 1980(ish).
Weirdly they are including cops killed by civilians and “government led executions” (?), and then they exclude civilians and call police killing civilians “police violence”.
They feel the need to bring in “global police violence” and keep returning to that.
They beat on the “racism is the cause of this” loudly and longly, but I can’t tell if that’s a conclusion or an assumption.
Going back to “police conflict and executions”.
OK, got to the meat of it. “From 1980 to 2018, the greatest under-reporting of deaths was among non-Hispanic Black people, with 5670 deaths (5390–5970) missing out of an estimated 9540 total deaths (9260–9830), which is 59·5% (58·3–60·7) misclassified. In this same time period, the NVSS did not record 8540 deaths (8200–8910) out of an estimated 15 200 (14 900–15 600) for non-Hispanic White people, which is a similar 56·1% (55·2–57·2) misclassified”
So what they’re saying is that police killings is higher than is claimed (comparing one database to three others), and that the whole thing is seriously racist, and that whites are miscounted at the same rate as blacks within the margin of error.
Also different states have wildly different rates of miscounting.Report
They beat on the “racism is the cause of this” loudly and longly, but vlI can’t tell if that’s a conclusion or an assumption.
“Tic” is probably the best word to use here. But given that the methodology had no way of testing this claim, it’s clearly just taken as axiomatic, as is standard practice.
Note that they lump Asians and Native Americans together into “other non-white” in order to avoid acknowledging the culture of Asian supremacism that pervades our nation’s police departments.Report
Personally, I find “this happened” to be a much more interesting proposition than “this happened because of racism”.Report
And this is why you’ll never get a job in media or academia.Report
I think the most important question is one we can’t really answer, which is what percentage of these fall into each of the following categories?
1. Justified and unavoidable without unacceptable risk to officers or victims.
2. Justified and no great loss, but if the officer had made extraordinary effort at significant risk of his or other lives, the suspect might be in prison.
3. Unjustified in retrospect, but the right call in light of the information available to the officer at the time.
4. Unjustified both in retrospect and in light of the information the officer had at the time, but an understandable error that a reasonable person could have made.
5. Grossly negligent error.
6. Actual murder.
I believe that I’ve listed these from most to least common, but do think it’s possible that 1 and 2 or 3 and 4 should be reversed. I’m also open to the idea that 5 may be more common than I think, but I’m deeply skeptical that 6 is more than a rounding error, and I roll my eyes hard every time I see someone describe a shooting that is at worst a 4 as “murder.”Report
Just because people call 4s murders shouldn’t distract from stuff like this.
Oh, and the whole “George Floyd” thing last year.Report
What’s the alternative to the official story here? After years on the job, one day a cop just says to himself, “Today I’m going to shoot a white girl for kicks and giggles?”
I don’t have handcuffs or a toy gun with me at the moment, but I’m pretty sure that it is possible to shoot yourself while handcuffed, especially if you’re very thin, and that strikes me as much more plausible than the above.
Even George Floyd was probably a 5. Regardless of whether excited delirium is actually a real thing, police officers were taught that it is, and they were trained to treat it with bodily restraint. Furthermore, the knee restraint that Chauvin used was an approved hold. Bad training and bad policing? Sure, I guess. It seems to me that should have cuffed Floyd and put him in the car as soon as he stopped resisting, with the caveat that like everyone else here, I don’t know anything about best practices for this kind of thing. But I think people saying that Chauvin intentionally killed Floyd are just too deeply invested in a sick fantasy. Maybe it’s true. Anything’s possible. Maybe after all those years he just rolled up in the police car and thought, “This is it. Today’s the day.” But that’s not where the smart money is.Report
Keep in mind the bar for ‘intent’ is a lot lower than that. You can establish it nearly instantaneously and one is deemed to intend the natural consequences of his actions.
That said I think you’re mostly right. ‘Racism’ as the end all be all explanation plays right into the hands of the status quo.* It’s hard to measure, hard to know when it plays a causal role, and hard to tell what ‘solved’ would really look like. What it does is allow the jurisdiction to pay some DEI contractor a few hundred g’s for some kind of talking to or ‘implicit bias training’ and they can say they’ve done something.
Maybe the cops cry about it and stand down for awhile, let crime increase a little to get people asking for them back. What the approach doesn’t do is anything to address the web of policies that allow police to be grossly negligent and unaccountable, which fosters a culture of gross negligence and unaccountability, and is of course rationalized ad nauseum by the police and the knee-jerk supporters of police. We then end up with these horrendous, highly visible outliers mistaken as cause when they are in fact symptom.
TLDR, what we have is a complicated but also kind of mundane public policy problem but that’s the last thing anyone ever wants to hear. Treating it as such would also be a much bigger threat to the police’s way of doing things than another decade of summers like 2020.
*This is my disclaimer for anyone who wants to jump in and yell at me on this point, that yes, racism exists and probably sometimes is a contributing factor. You have been heard and acknowledged.Report
Her hands were cuffed behind her back and she shot herself in the mouth?
I am willing to accept you merely touching wrists behind your back as you test this out.
As for the whole issue of whether they’re actively thinking “I’m going to do it!”, I more lean towards “I don’t care whether I do it because I have official cover”.
If you want examples of official cover, let’s assume that 17,000 is off by an order of magnitude and I’ll offer those 1,700 examples.Report
There’s a picture of her online with her back bent WAY more than I can do.
It might be a trick of the camera but I think we’re into “seriously flexible” territory, i.e. gymnastics training or something similar.
That doesn’t answer how she has access to a gun so there’s that.Report
There’s a picture of her online with her back bent WAY more than I can do.
How does writing that feel?
I mean, what is your brain doing as you typed that?Report
I gather information, then I evaluate the situation based on that information, then I repeat. That works much better than deciding what the truth is and then looking for information to support that.
I do that professionally. Way too often I find that I was wrong about the situation a few steps back.
For this situation, what we have is a stupid hard to believe story. Not quite impossible. Certainly not in a world where all local news is now national.
Information that says, yeah, the story is even harder/easier to believe than we thought is relevant.
The missing information is cam data… so we don’t have cameras running inside of cop cars?Report
Sadly, the police spokesperson said in August that a bodycam on one of the officers during the stop was knocked off the officer’s uniform.
For some reason the bodycam footage up to the moment of the struggle was also unavailable.Report
So they just kind of go out of the way to make their story as hard to believe as possible.
First question is whether or not there was a struggle with the boyfriend and what the cams say about that, “knocked off during the struggle” implies it was close enough that it would still be recording so we’d have audio.
In theory she was left by herself, presumably next to the fallen cam.
Big picture the problem isn’t that we’d have almost zero evidence as too what happened, it’s that the police’s record of investigating their own is really bad.Report
I just checked Occam’s Razor and it says “they were obviously forced to make their story as exonerative as possible given the indisputable facts. And that’s not terribly exonerative. You pretty much have to rely on people deliberately avoiding odious conclusions.”Report
Imho there’s more than enough to suggest that someone should be looking into this professionally.
But JB, there are a lot of unknowns here. Do people tend to turn up dead around these specific cops? Maybe a long list of sex complaints? Does handcuffed with her hands behind her and then left alone mean she moved her hands to her front?
IMHO you have this mental image where she still hand her hands tied behind her, couldn’t access a gun nor her mouth, and then “magically” ended up dead that way with this stupid story. Within the margin of reporting error, that might be accurate, but there’s not a lot of facts posted on this one so it also might not.
It’s been 3 years. What does not much out there mean? Cops playing stone wall suggests really bad things; But I can’t tell the difference between that and the media moving on.Report
Well, the problem is that they’re using the same playbook as the cops who killed Walter Scott.
And you know what would have happened if the only footage we had of Walter Scott was the bodycam on the police officer? We’d be discussing how convenient it was that it got knocked away before he allegedly grabbed the taser and tried to tase the cop.Report
Scott was killed in 2015 and in 2017 his killer got 20 years.
The solution for not enough information is more information, not to assume what we want to. The gun residue test on the hands would be useful, etc.
You’re correct in that the story stinks. So is anyone pursuing that? Is this a stone wall? What does the family know?
We’re internet desk jockeys. This medium has limitations. We know less, a lot less, here than we did with Freddie Gray.Report
Yes. Do you know why his killer got 20 years?
Because we saw what happened and what happened deviated from the official story.
So is anyone pursuing that? Is this a stone wall? What does the family know?
Who is in charge of pursuing this sort of thing?
What would a stone wall look like?
The family knows that their daughter had zero suicidal ideation and that you cannot shoot yourself in the mouth if your hands are cuffed behind your back.Report
They have said that, or are you just assuming they’ve said that because it’s what you want to believe?
When I try to look up what the family knows, I have a statement from 2019 that they had heard that the investigation was over and were waiting to talk to the city.
Do you have better/more recent info?Report
I’ve gotta say, when it comes to what I want to believe, I want to believe that cops wouldn’t kill someone and then cover it up.
But we’ve seen different cops do just that and there are a lot of similarities between events that have been proven to be examples of police engaging in grossly negligent error or actual homicide.
When I try to look up what the family knows, I have a statement from 2019 that they had heard that the investigation was over and were waiting to talk to the city.
Oh, I know that the investigation is over.
Was that in doubt?Report
Yes. That is the part that stands out.Report
Here’s the latest I can find:
https://www.wavy.com/news/investigative/police-leave-mother-with-more-questions-than-answers-after-daughters-suicide/
A couple facts included are that Sarah Wilson’s autopsy report showed acute intoxication from meth amphetamines and that she was shot with a Taurus Judge. I’d be surprised to hear of any US law enforcement using those as service weapons which suggests to me it was her’s or her boyfriend’s (these are Brazilian made, not the US or European pistols police usually carry these days). There’s also some suggestion that she was not properly restrained. The boyfriend plead out to drug dealing and firearm infractions.
It’s a weird case. I’m open to the possibility that the police did mostly right or were only slightly negligent. But it’s also possible the media is echoing a concocted story to cover up for some serious wrong-doing. The whole thing seems like it could be put to bed if the police released the body cam footage, which of course they won’t.Report
Thank you, excellent link.
OK, there were 6 cops there. It wasn’t a normal stop. Boyfriend is a drug dealer/user. Girl was very high on meth (autopsy) and was using a meth pipe when they were pulled over.
Basically the claim is after one of the cops put the cuffs on her, he ran to help the others (boyfriend was resisting) and she got back into the boyfriend’s car and killed herself.
Description from the mother says the girl had been a serious mess for years and was getting worse. Suicide sounds between reasonable and expected.
Which doesn’t change that the cops are acting like they, at a minimum, seriously screwed up. At maximum we’re in murder territory (killed her with the boyfriend’s gun then didn’t take the cuffs off to make it look reasonable) but that feels weird.
Edit: And out of the 6 cops, only one had a cam. It was knocked off during the encounter with the boyfriend and then picked up and turned back on after they handled him. (No, you can’t see what happened before).Report
Does “being high” make it more, or less plausible that she managed to shoot herself? Or is it irrelevant?
I ask because in all the drug panics I’ve witnessed, from marijuana to crack to angel dust, there is a constant tendency to portray people on drug as being possessed of superhuman strength and skill, when in fact its usually the opposite.
I mean, would anyone find it plausible that a guy who drank a fifth of vodka, somehow was able to twist and turn Chinese acrobat style and shoot himself in the mouth while handcuffed?
As opposed to the much simpler explanation?Report
Managed to shoot herself?
No.
Willing to do shockingly bad things like shoot herself?
Yes.
A few posts ago JB was claiming “The family knows that their daughter had zero suicidal ideation”. In reality her family paints her as someone who was self destructive and despairing. I would think a meth high would add “judgement impaired” to that list.Report
There is also the possibility that Sarah, being high, thought that threatening suicide would bee a good idea to distract the cops from her boyfriend, and very much accidentally shot herself (handling a gun backwards is tricky enough when sober and not panicky, and a Judge is not an easy gun to handle properly – I own one).
That said, she was in custody, hence the police are ultimately responsible for her well-being. We have 6 cops so laser-focused on the boyfriend that she was able to get up to shenanigans is a major screw-up on the police.Report
I can’t get in my head how she was holding the gun. We aren’t told enough.
Did she supposedly get the gun into her mouth before she pulled the trigger or did she have the gun three feet away pointed at her head with her mouth open?
If your mental view of this is her hands were firmly behind her and she ate the gun with her hands in front of her, then that’s unreasonable.
However that mental view is making assumptions.Report
Agreed, we’d need to know if her hands were in front or behind. If behind, there is no way she gets that gun in her mouth. If in front, then it’s possible (if she’s flexible enough, she might be able to step through the cuffs to get her hands in front).
The article InMD links states that she was shout in the mouth, and not in the face, or through the mouth/chin/face/etc. And that her hands were behind her. I just don’t see how that happens. If the ME said through the face/etc., then maybe it was a terribly lucky accidental discharge, but in the mouth suggests to me, that the barrel was between her teeth.
But without being able to see the ME report…Report
I just want to apply this logic to every liquor store robbery gone wrong, or mugging.
“Can you prove that the cashier didn’t grab the robber’s gun and shoot himself? Isn’t it at least theoretically possible?”Report
I didn’t use that logic.
If her hands were in front of her, and if she was so high that she had some weird internal logic that pointing a gun at her head or putting a gun in her mouth was a good idea, then maybe she might have accidentally shot herself. Call it the most extreme charitable (to the police) possibility given what I know. Even with that highly unlikely scenario, the fact remains that she was in custody, and her death is the cops responsibility.
If she died with her hands behind her and was shot in the face, which is how I read the information in that article, then it’s simply not physically possible for her to have committed suicide. Thus the police are covering it up.Report
I know you didn’t. I was referring to Dark’s logic and by extension, how the police are afforded every unreasonable assumption of innocence verging on comical absurdity, an assumption no other member of society is ever given.Report
1) Gun powder residue on the body and other indications will tell you how far away the shooter was.
2) Typically this isn’t the claim made.
3) Who cares? If you’re robbing the place and your gun kills him, then it’s on you. It’s even on you if your partner kills him. Or if someone decides to play hero (or is just suicidal) and you kill him.
Without the cuffs no one would be shocked if the high, self destructive girl who’d just flushed her life and had her boyfriend’s gun right there killed herself.
The argument I can’t make is “if they were lying they would have made up something less stupid like the BF shot her”. We have two groups of three cops and it’s possible that only one (or three) of them had a motive.
So in theory one of them kills her (for reasons we don’t know) and simply doesn’t have time to stage the crime scene.
Lessons to take from this one:
A) Put cams on all the cops, not just one. Similarly car cams would have been really useful.
B) Mandate release of the same. With the information in front of us we can’t tell if it’s…
1) Police screwed up and they don’t want to be sued. Badly placed cuffs (the mom is sure of that) combined with being left there next to the gun.
2) Police Murder.
3) Police are playing the long game and being ideological/strategic (not tactical). They didn’t do anything this time but don’t want a policy of openness so when they do bad things they can cover that.Report
You grab the gun and put it between your legs pointed upwards like a dick. Then you lower your head down on it while sliding your hands past your but.Report
And you pull the trigger how?Report
After you’re holding the barrel with your teeth you just need a finger.Report
Which are behind you…Report
I’m seriously NOT limber. If I can come within a few inches of doing it with a letter opener, then someone who is more flexible can just do it.
Sit down and put your hands below your knees. Try to put your head down on you knees. That’s the position.
You don’t need to be limber enough to slide your hands below your feet so they’re in front of you, all you have to do is slide your hands below your but when you’re sitting down.
Now I’d think you can’t be overweight to make this work because your gut would be in the way.
Correction: I can do this with a letter opener.Report
I would need to see evidence from the ME that this was the case, like GSR/contact burns between the legs.Report
Ditto. This isn’t just a “cop’s judgement” case, this is a “basic facts are in dispute”.Report
Do you like your Judge? I see them frequently at stores and shows but have never had an opportunity to fire one.
I’ve always been skeptical since price point and country of origin implies second rate but maybe I am just being a snob.Report
It’s decent. When I first got it, the trigger jammed and Taurus fixed it straight away.
The thing about the judge is that since it’s a multi caliber handgun, it’s not the best handgun for the calibers it can chamber. So it’s a bit of a gimmick gun. I wouldn’t use it for a carry gun.
That said, it is fun to shoot and not horribly inaccurate at normal pistol range.Report
Floyd made it impossible to put him into the car, ergo they’d called for an ambulance.
RE: Even George Floyd was probably a 5.
If the standard is “didn’t intend to kill him 2 minutes before he met him” then yeah. However it’s hard to see how anyone lives through what Floyd was put through.
Floyd certainly made it harder on himself by claiming he couldn’t breath long before he couldn’t breath… but I just can’t move past the whole “would have killed anyone who went through that”.
I can’t call it anything other than a 6. Presumably the cop’s wife filling papers(?) on him the day before had something to do with this one but whatever.Report
“I think the most important question is one we can’t really answer, which is what percentage of these fall into each of the following categories?”
Well… we COULD answer it if, you know, the accurately reported these deaths with all relevant details at the time they occurred.Report
Is the count solely about police contact that leads to death, or does it also include those who die while in custody?
ETA: Regardless of the why or other justification for a police involved death, the fact of the matter is, no one should be able to suggest that we are under-counting these deaths, or injuries, at all. If the police cause sufficient harm to a person to require some degree of first aid, or worse, that should be reported and tracked.Report
At several points they talk about the death penalty (meaning that’s in there adding sometimes… but only sometimes). Between that and the “everything must be racism” I was unwilling to chase where their heads were at for all of these numbers.
Bringing up things which affect your numbers which you then say you won’t let affect your numbers (and then going back to bring that up again) suggests that it’s not a good study.Report
Yeah, death penalty strikes me as bad data, because the police aren’t involved with that.
I’m interested in any death from the time of contact until the citizen is no longer in police custody (either released, or moved to DOC). I’m also interested in any accidental deaths from police activity (stray bullets killing bystanders, or MVAs that kill uninvolved motorists, etc.).Report
They look at any death caused by a police encounter (so some, but not all, deaths in custody). They do not look at judicial executions (so the death penalty is not involved).Report
I can’t send a kid home with the slightest mark on their body without notifying the parents in writing. An email typically suffices these days; previously we’d send home notes, preserving a copy on site.
For anything remotely serious (e.g., a head bump, a bite, anything for which we are referring them to a doctor), we must fill out a form that eventually gets filed with some government agency (can’t remember if it is the city DOH or a state-wide agency).
This is for small children who fell off the slide.Report
That deaths caused by police were underreported was well known before this. Counts based on media reporting have been averaging about a thousand per year in recent years, while FBI reporting showed about half that.
I suspect that they’re still undercounting deaths earlier in the study period; given how much homicide and other violent crime have fallen since the 80s, it’s unlikely that the rate of police-involved deaths has, increased substantially since then.
I’m not sure why they’re playing up the racism angle given the truly horrific level of sexism shown in the statistics. Men are killed by police at twenty times the rate at which women are.
#MaleLivesMatterReport
Maybe it’s an interesting analysis, but at the base, it’s simply comparing one database vs another for the past 4 years and then extrapolating backwards for 30. Maybe that is useful so glad it was done.
By far the thing that triggered immediate annoyance for me in the NPR quote (and the abstract it quoted from) was the use of “were understated” and not “were understated against our model”.
Don’t know why that annoyed me but it did.Report
My assumption is that Blue Omerta has been going on for a long while and stuff that used to get covered up (and covered up easily) is now being brought to light.
I’m sure you remember the Walter Scott killing.
10 years before, the guy wouldn’t have had a phone that recorded video.
The cops would have gotten off.
More and more, citizen journalists are capturing things on camera when, before, it would have been the word of the cops against the word of the crazy person who said that the cops planted a taser after they shot the guy in the back.Report
The most extensive database of those they compared to NVSS covers 15 years. None of the databases cover 4 years. They did exclude the first 4 years from Fatal Encounters, covering 2000-2004, because of completeness issues for those years, so perhaps that’s where you got the “4 years” number?Report
This is only one study.
Put this together though, with all the recorded incidents of police being caught in baldface lies and distortions over the past few years, and what emerges is the conclusion that the police departments have a credibility approaching that of the Chinese Communist Party. And this is created from a culture of impunity and insularity where they view themselves as less servants of the people and more as occupying forces ruling a hostile enemy territory.Report