The police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in 2020 triggered an unprecedented, beautiful uprising of people across the U.S. (and reverberating around the world). It was a global expression of outrage at the degradation, brutality, and murder by America’s pigs and the systematic oppression of Black and other people of color.
Since then, various researchers have been examining data that reveal the number of killings by the police in this country is being greatly under-reported by the authorities. In addition, because there is no national data compiled on non-fatal shootings or other injuries at the hands of the police, the full extent of the threat, and use, of force and violence by police as the cornerstone of maintaining this system is being hidden from view.
A report published in October 2021 in the British medical journal Lancet found:
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.
The researchers in the Lancet report compared data from the official U.S. National Vital Statistics System (NVSS) to three nongovernmental open-source databases on fatal police violence over the 40-year study period (1980-2019). They found that there were more than 30,000 police killings over those four decades—17,000 more than reported by NVSS. That means over those 40 years, police killings were under-reported by 55.5 percent. How is this possible?
“The same government responsible for this violence is also responsible for reporting on it”
The researchers' review of decades of data found many of the police killings are “misclassified” because the person responsible for certifying the cause of death “fails to mention police involvement”—by accident or design—in describing “how the injury occurred.” This happens most often when the victim is Black or Hispanic. Over the same 40-year period, Black people were estimated to be 3.5 times more likely to die from police violence than whites.
However, the more sinister cause the researchers found was the “conflicts of interest” within the death investigation system that “dis-incentivise” (discourage) the medical examiners and coroners who certify from indicating police involvement. In many cases the medical examiners and coroners are embedded within police departments. Besides those willingly covering up to protect the pigs and the system they work for, a survey of National Association of Medical Examiners members in 2011 found that 22 percent of respondents reported having been pressured by an elected official or appointee to change cause or manner of death on a certificate. As one of the co-authors of the Lancet report put it, “The same government responsible for this violence is also responsible for reporting on it.”
The online database Mapping Police Violence found that based on data from multiple sources, police killed at least 1,201 people in 2022. Black people were 26 percent of those killed by police that year despite being only 13 percent of the population. More people were killed by police in 2022 than any other year in the past decade. (97 percent of people killed by police in 2022 were killed by police shootings. Tasers, physical force, and being hit by police vehicles accounted for most other deaths.) They found that 59 percent of the police killings in 2022—685 deaths—began as traffic stops, police responses to mental health crises, or situations where the person was not reportedly threatening anyone with a gun. Black people were not only more likely than white people to be killed by police but also more likely to be unarmed, and less likely to be threatening someone when killed by police. Yet in only 11 of these 1201 cases—one percent—were the cops who did the killings charged with a crime.
Overlooked in the Undercounted—the Criminalization, and Killing, of the Mentally Ill
The Treatment Advocacy Center report of 2016—Overlooked in the Undercounted: The Role of Mental Illness in Fatal Law Enforcement Encounters—found the risk of being killed when stopped by the cops is 16 times higher for people with untreated serious mental illness than for other people. Some estimates show at least a quarter of those killed by police were suffering from serious mental illness, while other studies report that as many as one-half of those the police killed in a year were suffering severe mental illness. The authors of the TAC Report also emphasize that too often the role of severe mental illness is overlooked, even where attention is being focused on the under-counting.
Magnitude of Non-Fatal Injuries by Police Is Shocking
How many people do the pigs in America injure in a year? An estimated 250,000 people—a quarter of a million!—suffer injuries at the hands of the cops, with 85,000 requiring hospital treatment. But the government does not even gather or keep track of this data on non-fatal shootings and other injuries caused by cops. As one researcher noted, “It’s crazy to me that we don’t know how often police officers shoot people in the United States.”
Both Blacks and Latinos are twice as likely as whites to experience the threat or use of force by cops in encounters initiated by the police. And Black people are almost five times more likely than whites to suffer an injury requiring medical care at a hospital when stopped by cops.
To End Police Terror You Have to Put an End to the System That Needs Police Terror
The extent of the violence and terror carried out by the brutal enforcers of this system of capitalism-imperialism is staggering. And the fact that Black and other oppressed people are the disproportionate targets of their brutality and murder is no accident.
White supremacy has been poured into the foundation and built into the institutions and the ongoing functioning of this system from its very beginning in the enslavement and murder of millions of Africans and the genocide of the indigenous peoples. There can't and won't be any serious moves by the powers that be to overcome these centuries of oppression and degradation because to do so would completely disrupt the social “cohesion” of white supremacy which holds this country together.1
This system is unreformable—It must be overthrown. The fact is all this can be ended through the revolution to abolish this whole system and bring a radically different and far better system into being. In the 2014 Dialogue Between Cornel West & Bob Avakian—REVOLUTION AND RELIGION: The Fight for Emancipation and the Role of Religion, BA draws on the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America to paint a powerful, moving picture of how this police terror will be stopped right away under the new revolutionary socialist society. And he describes how the orientation of the people's police—really there to serve and protect the people—would sooner be to put their own lives on the line, and if need be would lay down their lives, before ever thinking of brutalizing any of the people. (Listen to the excerpt.)
Compare this to the swaggering, trigger-happy, overseer pigs in Amerikkka today. Why should we settle for anything less?
_______________
Sources:
-
More than half of US police killings are mislabelled or not reported, study finds, Gloria Oladipo, the Guardian, October 1, 2021
-
U.S. Data on Police Shootings and Violence, Law Enforcement Epidemiology Project, University of Illinois Chicago
-
More than half of police killings in USA are unreported and Black Americans are most likely to experience fatal police violence, Lancet, October 2, 2021
-
The number of civilians killed by the police has been greatly undercounted in official stats for decades, PBS NewsHour, October 5, 2021
-
People with Untreated Mental Illness 16 Times More Likely to Be Killed By Law Enforcement, Treatment Advocacy Center
-
Overlooked in the Undercounted: The Role of Mental Illness in Fatal Law Enforcement Encounters, Treatment Advocacy Center, December 2015
-
Seeking Justice for Civilians Injured by Law Enforcement, Ben Seal, The Record, Boston University School of Law, May 25, 2023
-
Data Lacking on Non-Fatal Police Shootings, The Crime Report, January 6, 2021