More than half of U.S. police killings are misclassified, study says
CBSN
London — Official statistics have undercounted deaths at the hands of police in the United States by more than half over the last 40 years, according to a new study published in The Lancet medical journal. Over that period, the study found that Black Americans were about 3.5 times more likely to die by police violence than White Americans.
"Police violence is for sure a public health issue and we need to discuss it," Dr. Ali H. Mokdad, one of the authors of the study and a professor at the University of Washington School of Medicine, told CBS News.
Researchers compared data recorded in the U.S. National Vital Statistics System, which is the government database that collates official death certificates, with three open-source, non-governmental databases that track incidents of police violence. They discovered that more than 17,000 deaths by police violence were either misclassified or not reported in the official database since 1980.
