A new study of police stops and arrests in the United States confirms what some have argued for a while: Police are not that much more likely to injure or kill African Americans once they’ve made a stop or arrested someone, but they’re much more likely to stop and arrest African Americans in the first place.
If the result isn’t surprising—and at this point, it really shouldn’t be—the means by which Ted Miller and his colleagues at the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation reached their conclusion should be: Rather than rely on police-reported statistics, they relied on ICD-9 codes, the same system used to record colds, cancer, and broken bones.
“Deaths from legal police intervention are underidentified or undercounted in US Vital Statistics, FBI Supplemental Homicide Reports, and Bureau of Justice Statistics Arrest-Related Deaths programme data,” the research team writes in Injury Prevention.
Indeed, the government’s own statistics don’t even agree, and certain statistics from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention likely report only about 50 to 60 percent of police homicides, sometimes because reports simply don’t mention police involvement, according to research published in March. Meanwhile, researchers know very little about non-fatal injuries inflicted by police during traffic stops, arrests, and other activities.
[For more of this story, written by Nathan Collins, go to https://psmag.com/the-story-of...ccab02433#.50apl54vd]
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