civilians

Moshen Naghavi, University of Washington; Eve Wool, University of Washington, and Fablina Sharara, University of Washington The Research Brief is a short take about interesting academic work. The big idea The number of people killed by police officers in the U.S. has been massively under-reported in official statistics over the past four decades, with an additional 17,000 deaths over that period, according to our new research. Our study, which was published on Oct. 2, 2021, in The Lancet, compared statistics from the National Vital Statistics System, a federal database that looks at death certificates, with data from three nongovernmental organizations that more accurately track police violence: Mapping Police Violence, Fatal Encounters, and The Counted. We found more than 30,000 deaths...

Many police chiefs and regular American civilians agree that officers’ body camera footage should be released to the public after police shoot someone dead. They differ, though, on when the images should be made public. This complicates achieving accountability, which is often the reason officers wear cameras. That’s the finding of our new research, published by Cambridge University Press. We surveyed 4,000 U.S. residents – 1,000 across the nation as a whole and 1,000 in each of three cities – Los Angeles, Seattle and Charlotte – which are often cited as having different policies for releasing body camera footage. We asked participants whether they identified themselves as white, Black, Hispanic or Asian. We also surveyed 1,000 police chiefs across the country. In June 2020, weeks after...

Tag: civilians

In Official Statistics Police Killings Of Civilians In The US Have Been Under-Counted By More Than Half

When Body Camera Footage Should Be Made Public, Police And Civilians Disagree