Study: Police kill more people in this state than any other many deaths go unreported

[GMDino]

Via the Drudge Retort

USA Today Headline

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/09/30/police-killings-oklahoma-underreported-highest-rate-study/5922021001/

Quote:Oklahoma has the highest mortality rate of police violence of all 50 states and the highest rate of underreporting the killings, according to estimates in a study released Thursday.

About84% of police killings in the state from 1980 to 2018 were unreported or misclassified in official government reports, according to the peer-reviewed study in The Lancet, one of the world's oldest and most renowned medical journals.

The study, which involved more than 90 collaborators, compared data from the U.S. National Vital Statistics System, an inter-governmental system that collates all death certificates, to three open-source databases, which collect information on fatal police violence from news reports and public record requests.

Nationwide, more than 55% of deaths from police violence from 1980 to 2018 were misclassified or unreported, the study estimated.

Police violence:More than half of police killings in the US are unreported in government data
Oklahoma police:5 Oklahoma City officers charged with first-degree manslaughter in fatal shooting of teen

Arizona, Alaska, Nevada and Wyoming trailed Oklahoma as the states with the highest mortality rate of police violence, the researchers found.

Wyoming, Alabama, Louisiana and Nebraska were among the top five states with the highest underreporting rates.


Oklahoma had the highest rate of police violence against Black Americans, the study found.


From 2000 to 2009, the states with the highest rates of police violence toward non-Hispanic Black Americans were Oklahoma, Nevada, Nebraska, Iowa and Kansas. From 2010 to 2019, they were Oklahoma, Alaska, West Virginia, Utah and Washington, D.C.

The Oklahoma Association of Chiefs of Police did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The states with the lowest mortality rate of fatal police violence from 1980 to 2019 were Massachusetts, Connecticut, Minnesota, North Dakota, New Hampshire and New York, the study found.


The states with the lowest underreporting rates from 1980 to 2018 were Maryland, Utah, New Mexico, Massachusetts and Oregon.

Oklahoma City:Grandmother, 74, sues police, saying they broke her arm after illegally entering her home
Chance Avery:Oklahoma police officer to face trial in fatal shooting

Fablina Sharara, one of the lead authors and a researcher at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington School of Medicine, told USA TODAY that researchers did not study the specific causes of police violence and underreporting of police violence at the state level.

"We believe that this knowledge is vital to informing policy change to prevent police violence and improve reporting and hope that the revised estimates of police violence presented in our study will be used as a jumping-off point for further investigation and policy change in these areas," Sharara said.


D. Brian Burghart, who runs Fatal Encounters, one of the open-source databases used in the study, said the researchers' finding that most police killings are not included in official government data was "nothing very surprising."

"I've seen many studies that have come to the same conclusion," Burghart said. "In my opinion, much of the social unrest the U.S. has seen in the last few years comes as a result of not having meaningful government data regarding police violence."
 

So naturally this will be seen by those with a personal agenda as an attack on police rather a look at the oversight that is needed and how good/better/more accurate data is needed and can be used to better understand these things.  I also assume it will result in name calling calling and will contain nothing to refute the study or the merits of it.
But I'll maintain that if we want to see if there even is an issue or situation that needs addressed we must have all the data.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)01609-3/fulltext#seccestitle170

Quote:Under-reporting obfuscates and minimises the larger public health issue, high rates of fatal police violence with serious disparities in race and ethnicity. While the purpose of our model was strictly predictive, and not designed or intended for inferential or causal analysis, it is crucial to consider the causes of police violence to understand this health crisis. Long-standing research in the USA has well established that the disproportionate amount of police violence against Black Americans is driven by systemic racism.2,  55,  56 Black Americans experience disproportionately high levels of police contact, even for crimes that Black and White Americans commit at the same rates, such as certain drug offences, and for interactions that are not triggered by criminal activity, such as investigatory traffic stops.57 Police are more likely to shoot Black civilians than White civilians given the same levels of criminal activity, even when the civilian is unarmed.58,  59,  60 In addition to a disproportionate burden of fatal violence at the hands of the police, systemic racism also makes non-Hispanic Black people more likely to be incarcerated than other racial groups (details on the association between incarceration and police violence can be found in the appendix p 9).61,  62

Racial bias in policing does not exist in a vacuum: it follows the pattern of anti-Black racism in the criminal justice system throughout the USA's history.57 Police forces should exist to enforce laws that protect public safety, but throughout the USA's history, police have been used to enforce racist and exploitative social orders that endanger the safety of the most marginalised groups in society.63 Some of the earliest examples of policing include the capture of runaway slaves, dismantling labour strikes and movements, and stopping riots, protests, or other expressions of social rage.63,  64,  65,  66,  67 In the post-slavery South, the police stopped organisers, threatened and beat protestors, denied protest permits, and did not protect demonstrators from mobs that bombed and killed them.63,  68,  69 Today, US police are heavily militarised, and fatal police violence disproportionately affects Black, Indigenous, and Hispanic people. Police are trained that any interaction can turn deadly and that they should react as such.63 Heavily armed officers can dangerously escalate situations that never needed violent intervention.70,  71,  72 Federal programmes provide the police with military equipment and outfit officers with lethal weapons that are unnecessary to protect their communities.70 Importantly, deaths from police violence are seldom uniformly distributed within populations, frequently serving to exacerbate societal unrest and highlighting persistent inequalities.72 During the George Floyd protests in 2020, which were in direct response to racist police violence, The Guardian documented 950 instances of police violence against civilians and journalists.73 These include more than 500 instances of the police using less-lethal rounds (rubber bullets), pepper spray, and tear gas; 60 instances of unlawful assembly to arrest protesters; and 19 of permissiveness to white supremacists,73 when not showing the same restraint towards demonstrators. Accountability and transparency in policing are lacking, as evidenced by ongoing problems with under-reporting. Police officers who kill civilians are rarely charged with a crime; Mapping Police Violence reports that in 2017, of 1147 deaths, officers were charged with a crime in 13 cases, or 1% of the time. Police violence and racism in policing in the USA are not new or unexplained problems; they are the current manifestations of a system that was built to uphold racial hierarchy for most of the USA's history.

This study has some limitations. First, this study does not calculate or address non-fatal injuries inflicted by the police. This topic is crucial to understanding the full burden of police violence and should be examined in future studies.74,  75 We also excluded police officers killed by civilians and executions from our analysis of police violence. These data can be found elsewhere76 and should be analysed separately. This analysis does not include military police and residents who might have been harmed by military police, in the USA or abroad. Additionally, the open-sourced data used for this study do not cover fatal police violence in US territories; therefore, violence in those locations would need to be analysed separately. Finally, our modelling framework assumes constant under-reporting in NVSS across age and sex, an assumption that might not hold in all cases (appendix p 8), and our estimation strategy applies national-level age and sex trends to all states and races. We encourage future research to improve the estimation of police violence by age and sex.

Our data processing of demographic information also had several limitations. Death certificates in the USA only allow for a binary designation of sex and do not distinguish between sex assigned at birth and gender identity; by contrast, the open-source databases all record several decedents with their gender listed as transgender or non-binary. To tabulate our data to populations large enough to support our statistical analysis, we used the GBD's age-sex-splitting algorithm to reassign deaths with transgender or non-binary coding in the three open-source databases to male and female. This approach erases the existence of non-cisgender people and masks the disproportionately high rates of violence against transgender and, most acutely, Black transgender people.77,  78 The intersectionality of gender, race and ethnicity, sexual orientation, and other identities and the relationship to fatal police violence should be studied in the future.79

Due to high missingness in race and ethnicity in early years of Fatal Encounters and NVSS data, we relied on algorithms such as proportional reassignment based on known data, surname-based and geography-based imputation, and back-extrapolation of relative mortality rates to obtain estimates by race and ethnicity. Although these methods rely on imperfect assumptions, we believe that they are as correct as possible without record linkage or further primary data collection and that they allow us to accurately estimate serious disparities in police violence across race and ethnicity.

Police violence, like other forms of violence, is preventable.13,  80 The American Public Health Association, the American College of Physicians, the American Medical Association, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, as well as a large number of government agencies, advocacy groups, and community organisations, condemn police violence and its underlying racism, identifying it as a public health crisis.6,  12,  14,  81,  82

Data collection that occurs without conflicting interests of the state is crucial to capture the full burden of deaths due to police violence. With each iteration of GBD, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation will compare open-source data with NVSS data and publicise the findings—a step towards transparent reporting of fatal police violence. Some progress has been made in the USA with the implementation of the National Violent Deaths Reporting System in 2003, a state-based surveillance system that shows improved coverage of fatal police violence when compared with the NVSS; however, this system still shows undercounting when compared with open-source databases and needs improved geographical and temporal coverage (appendix p 3). Globally, some independent data-collection agencies are already reporting on state-sanctioned violence, including Amnesty International, The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, and the Uppsala Conflict Data Program. These data sources already critically inform GBD estimates for police conflict and executions, war and terrorism, and other violent causes. We suggest that other researchers adapt our data-seeking criteria and correction methodology to study biases that might exist in other government-run data-collection agencies globally. The increased use of open-source data-collection initiatives allows researchers and policy makers to document and highlight disparities in police violence by race, ethnicity, and gender, allowing for targeted, meaningful changes to policing and public safety that will prevent loss of life.

Improved training and clearer instructions on how to document police violence in text fields on death certificates could improve reporting.35 Coroners and forensic medical experts also propose that to avoid incorrect assignment of cause of death due to pressure from the police, politicians, or the deceased family members, forensic pathologists should work independently from law enforcement.53 Additionally, forensic pathologists often must investigate and testify in cases of police violence.53 To ensure that pathologists are free from pressures that could influence these cases, pathologists should be awarded whistleblower protections under the law.53

[*michaelsean*]

When they say underreport what do they mean? Is there perhaps a specific federal department you report it to? Obviously the information is somewhere or this study wouldn’t know about it. Also I fully admit it could have been mentioned and I missed it.

[GMDino]

(10-04-2021, 07:09 PM)michaelsean Wrote: When they say underreport what do they mean?  Is there perhaps a specific federal department you report it to?  Obviously the information is somewhere or this study wouldn’t know about it. Also I fully admit it could have been mentioned and I missed it.

From the link to the study:

Quote:This study examines the presence and extent of under-reporting of police violence in US Government-run vital registration data, offers a method for correcting under-reporting in these datasets, and presents revised estimates of deaths due to police violence in the USA.


[color=var(--theme-headings,#00539e)]Methods[/color]
We compared data from the USA National Vital Statistics System (NVSS) to three non-governmental, open-source databases on police violence: Fatal Encounters, Mapping Police Violence, and The Counted. We extracted and standardised the age, sex, US state of death registration, year of death, and race and ethnicity (non-Hispanic White, non-Hispanic Black, non-Hispanic of other races, and Hispanic of any race) of each decedent for all data sources and used a network meta-regression to quantify the rate of under-reporting within the NVSS. Using these rates to inform correction factors, we provide adjusted estimates of deaths due to police violence for all states, ages, sexes, and racial and ethnic groups from 1980 to 2019 across the USA.

When they say "under reported" they mean exactly that.  The deaths are not reported here which leads to an undercount of those involved in police related deaths.