By Kevin Deutsch
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Black men in America are two-and-a-half times more likely to be killed by law enforcement over their lifetime than white men, according to a new Rutgers-Newark study.
University researchers examined fatality risks during police encounters – some 11,456 between 2013-2017 – and found that African-American men and women, American Indian/Alaska Native men and women and Latino men face a higher lifetime risk of being killed by police than do their white peers.
Black men in the U.S. had a 1 in 1,000 chance of being killed by police compared to about 1 in 2,000 for all men, the study found.
“The inequality is not surprising,” said lead author Frank Edwards, assistant professor in the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University-Newark, noting the police killings of black men like Michael Brown and Eric Garner, and boys like Tamir Rice, and the protests that followed that brought national attention to the racialized character of police violence against civilians. “All you have to do is turn on the news to see that people of color are at a much greater risk of police-related harm. What we lack in this country are the solid estimates of police related deaths because there is no official database where this information is stored.”
Frank Edwards, assistant professor in the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University-Newark, says a database of official police-related deaths is needed to track the information.
The Rutgers study used data compiled by the National Vital Statistic System’s mortality files and Fatal Encounters (FE), a journalist-led database that documents deaths involving police where cases are identified through public records and news coverage. Edwards said the unofficial media-based methods provide more comprehensive information on police violence than the limited official data collected.
The aim of the research, Edwards said, is to highlight the need to create a database that would accurately reflect the police violence that occurs.
“We haven’t really known for sure how often these killings have been happening because the data hasn’t been good enough,” said Edwards. “But if we are going to try and change police practices that aren’t working, we need to track this information better.”
While statistics show that police in the United States kill more people than police in other advanced industrial democracies, researchers say real estimates of how often this occurs are not available. Official data is needed because these violent encounters, they insist, have profound effects on health, neighborhoods, life chances and politics and have resulted in structural inequalities in the United States between people of color and white people.
The study found that the risk of death for each group peaks between the ages of 20 and 35 and declines with age. The highest mortality rate for men is between the ages of 25-29 when police use-of-force is deemed to be the sixth leading cause of death, behind accidents – including drug overdoses, motor vehicle traffic death and other accidental fatalities – suicide, other homicides, heart disease and cancer.