[Editor's Note: Four hours post-publication, added controversial to the headline for additional transparency.]
A new study published in The Lancet says the United States has been underreporting deaths caused by police by 55 percent, an amount that totals more than 17,000 additional deaths between 1980 and 2018.
Mohsen Naghavi, a professor at the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, led a multi-disciplinary team in comparing data from the U.S.’s National Vital Statistics System (NVSS) with three non-government, open-source databases on police violence—Fatal Encounters, Mapping Police Violence and The Counted.
While these findings have renewed calls for the need of separation between law enforcement and coroners/forensic medical professionals, some have questioned the data used in the open-source databases as being biased themselves, therefore proposing the entire study as unreliable.
They authors of the study say they consider The Counted to be the gold standard databse due to its open-source methodology, case definition of police violence and high completeness on race and ethnicity. Thus, they used a network meta-regression to quantify the biases of the three other datasets compared with The Counted for any given state, race and ethnicity and year.
According to the study, the misclassification of police violence in NVSS data is extensive. From 1980 to 2018, the NVSS did not report 17,100 deaths out of 30,800 deaths—an underreporting of 55.5%. In 2018 alone, the most recent year of available NVSS data, 642 deaths out of 1,240 were missing, a misclassification of 51.8%.
The data shows the highest underreporting from the NVSS occurred for deaths of Black Americans at 59.5%. However, the issue did not only affect Black persons. The NVSS missed 56.1% of deaths of non-Hispanic White people, 32.6% of non-Hispanic people of other races, and 50.0% of Hispanic people of any race.
However, the authors conclude that police have disproportionately killed Black people at a rate of 3.5 times higher than White people, and have killed Hispanic and Indigenous people disproportionately as well. In fact, they found the rate of fatal police violence was higher in every year for Black Americans than for White Americans.
The findings vary greatly based on state. From 1980 to 2018, the top five states with the highest underreporting rates were Oklahoma (83.7% of deaths misclassified), Wyoming (79.1%), Alabama (76.9%), Louisiana (75.7%), and Nebraska (72.9%). Meanwhile, Maryland (16.4%), Utah (19.8%), New Mexico (26·4%), Massachusetts (32.5%) and Oregon (36.3%) had the lowest percentages of misclassifications in the same time period.
The researchers attribute at least some of this underreporting to the nuances of death certificates. It asks the certifier—who, depending on where the death occurred, can be anyone from a registered forensic pathologist to a local sheriff/coroner combo—to “describe how the injury occurred.” If this section does not mention that the decedent was killed by the police, then the death will not be assigned to legal intervention. The researchers say avoiding legal ramifications, in addition to the open-endedness of the question and a lack of knowledge/training, all play a part in the underreporting numbers.
The pressure to circumvent legal intervention brings up another point of contention in the industry—numerous conflicts of interest. In many circumstances, medical examiners and coroners work for or are embedded within police departments, meaning they could feel both internal and external pressure to protect police from negative consequences.
For example, a 2013 study found over 30% of forensic medical professionals who responded to a survey said fear of litigation affected their diagnostic decision-making. To correct this, the researchers say coroners and forensic medical professionals should work independently from police departments, and even be awarded whistleblower protection to ensure they are completely free from external pressures.
Again, while the 2013 survey is unrelated, concerns have been cast on the validity of the data used from the three open-sourced databases and the extrapolation methods inferred from there.
“Beyond the issue of reporting police violence accurately, the field of public health must turn its attention to ultimately eliminating the burden of police violence,” the authors conclude. “The USA must replace militarized policing with evidenced-based support for communities, prioritize the safety of the public, and value Black lives.”