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