Fatal police violence by race and state in the USA, 1980–2019

MaverickNH

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This Lancet paper just started getting press late Thursday 30 Sept - USAToday below, NYT, WaPo, etc., likely to follow. And 91 authors? If they couldn’t find 100, it’s a fail.

"Across all races and states in the USA, we estimate 30 800 deaths (95% uncertainty interval [UI] 30 300–31 300) from police violence between 1980 and 2018; this represents 17 100 more deaths (16 600–17 600) than reported by the NVSS. Over this time period, the age-standardised mortality rate due to police violence was highest in non-Hispanic Black people (0·69 [95% UI 0·67–0·71] per 100 000), followed by Hispanic people of any race (0·35 [0·34–0·36]), non-Hispanic White people (0·20 [0·19–0·20]), and non-Hispanic people of other races (0·15 [0·14– 0·16]). This variation is further affected by the decedent's sex and shows large discrepancies between states. Between 1980 and 2018, the NVSS did not report 55·5% (54·8–56·2) of all deaths attributable to police violence. When aggregating all races, the age-standardised mortality rate due to police violence was 0·25 (0·24–0·26) per 100 000 in the 1980s and 0·34 (0·34–0·35) per 100 000 in the 2010s, an increase of 38·4% (32·4–45·1) over the period of study."

There appears to be some evidence supporting the notion authorities attempt to suppress classification of Blacks when killed by police. Many will assume the killings were white cops killing innocent Blacks. The paper notes: "Stark inequities in the burden of police killings by race and ethnicity within the USA highlight the urgent need to address systemic racism within the US police force." No effort was made to study whether the police killings were justified or not - these days, justification of self-defense against an attacker is judged by the attacker’s race rather than their threat.

Given that riots, looting and burning frequently follow even justified shootings of Blacks threatening police and others with guns and knives, one can only wonder if authorities try to minimize such exposure for the sake of public order and undesirable consequence for police departments and the cops involved. Probably the wrong thing to do, but doing the job well and correctly can end careers, depending on public reaction. More so in recent years.
 
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The article may not take this into account, but it should: states with elected coroners are likely to have much higher unreported deaths caused by police using force.

From a Radley Balko article in 2017:

As it turns out, this is a fun little artifact of the coroner system, which the United States inherited from Britain. Coroners are often confused with medical examiners, but they are two very different positions, and they rarely overlap. A medical examiner is a doctor who performs autopsies after suspicious deaths. The county coroner is an elected position. In most states, you don’t need any medical training, police training or crime investigation training to run for the office. There are only a few states where the coroner must be a physician, and even in those states there’s a big loophole — if no doctor wants the office, anyone can run for it.

For much of the past century, coroners played a shameful but often unnoticed role in facilitating lynchings, assassinations and other racial violence. Too often, coroners’ juries determined an obvious lynching to be a suicide or natural death. Even in cases in which they did determine a death to be homicide, they made little to no effort to ascertain the identities of the culprits, as they did in other cases.

Allowing the official in charge of death investigations to be beholden to political forces is a bad idea, for lots of reasons. There are the obvious ones, like those already mentioned — coroners could be susceptible to influence by powerful interests that may have a stake in the outcome of a death investigation. As the story that kicked off this post illustrates, you also want the person in charge of determining cause and manner of death to be as insulated as possible from pressure by law enforcement officials. Deaths in police custody are the obvious concern here, but we’ve also seen examples where law enforcement pressure resulted in a homicide determination in cases where a child may have died accidentally, such as with shaken baby syndrome. The reverse can be a problem — sometimes, a sheriff or prosecutor may not want to deal with another unsolved murder and might pressure a coroner to rule an obvious homicide to be an accident, a suicide or a natural death. While this obviously isn’t the norm, it isn’t unheard of, and it tends to happen most often when the deceased is part of a marginalized community — where the death isn’t deemed “important.”

To some extent, a prosecutor or police chief unhappy with a cause of death determination will always be able to apply some pressure, no matter who is doing the determining. (See John Edland, the heroic medical examiner who autopsied the bodies after the Attica prison uprising.) But a medical examiner appointed by an official outside of law enforcement will be less susceptible than a low-level elected official.
Medical examiners are also often the first to notice outbreaks of communicable diseases. They can be the first to notice patterns of deaths from environmental toxins, or trends in fatalities that come with the adoption of new technologies (Tasers, for example). Here, too, it seems wise to keep them insulated from political pressure.

 
The article may not take this into account, but it should: states with elected coroners are likely to have much higher unreported deaths caused by police using force.

From a Radley Balko article in 2017:

Very interesting - we usually think of hired/appointed public service workers as more susceptible to pressure and bias from “the system”. The Lancet article just fuels the fervor over race inequities, offering only “Proven public health intervention strategies are needed to address these systematic biases” - a call for a good solution. Their solution is open-sourced database input. Stuff like Gun Violence Archive - partisan groups interpreting biased media accounts of events.
 
Very interesting - we usually think of hired/appointed public service workers as more susceptible to pressure and bias from “the system”.
Elected officials are susceptible to whatever gets them elected, especially when the office holds power and a lot of visibility (not applicable to NH state reps, obviously). Election of judges and DAs shifts with the wind, and the wind most commonly blows in favor of "lock 'em up".

I'm from Arkansas, where the elected "coroner" needn't have any medical experience. It's usually the owner of the most popular funeral home. Death certificates in Texas can be signed by a Justice of the Peace (an elected member of the county's Quorum Court, the county legislature). County Judge in both states is the county's chief executive, with almost no judicial authority. Their biggest power is authority over the county road crews (in rural states with lots of unincorporated territory, that means the road to your house could be paved, or could be a washboard, depending on how you and your neighbors vote).

Don't even get started on Louisiana "Police Jury", which is the worst of all of the above combined with the state's reputation for corruption.
 
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