A new study published by the British medical journal, The Lancet, estimates that nearly 31,000 people have been killed by the police over a 40-year period and that more than half of these murders, more than 17,000, were not included in “official” statistics.
Researchers at the University of Washington compared information from death certificates with data from organizations that track police killings in the U.S. through news reports and public records requests. They found a “racial bias” among medical examiners who “mislabeled” killings by the police. And they found a big discrepancy: Between 1980 and 2018, about 55 percent of fatal encounters with the police were listed with some other cause of death. This study exposes the role medical examiners and coroners play in covering up police murder. They often work closely with the pigs and in many cases are even employed by police departments and some of them report being pressured by the police to change their findings.
The study tracked police killings over a time period during the “war on drugs” and the huge rise in mass incarceration. It documents that Black people were 3.5 times as likely to be killed by the police as white people and that Latinos and Native Americans were also killed by the police at a higher rate than white people. Oklahoma, Arizona and Alaska, and Washington, DC had the highest rates of police killings.
Behind these stark new statistics are real people, lives, fathers, sons, brothers, sisters. A loved one gone—many times shot and killed just because of the color of their skin. Devastated families who will ache with unending pain, missing their loved ones, whose lives are forever changed. So much sadness, but also intense anger.
The study did not mention specific cases, but here are just a few examples:
*After George Floyd was choked to death by a Minneapolis pig, the medical examiner initially said the cause of death was drug use and “underlying health conditions.”
*A coroner said 49-year-old Ronald Greene, a Black man in Louisiana, had died from cardiac arrest. Later a video came out showing how Greene was shocked, choked, and beaten by state troopers.
*In Aurora, Colorado, the pigs put Elijah McClain in a chokehold and paramedics injected him with ketamine, a powerful sedative. The cause of McClain’s death was ruled “undetermined.”
*In Gatesville, Texas, 46-year-old Kelli Leanne Page was being held in jail on a drug charge when guards threw her to the floor, punched her in the face, and held her down until she stopped breathing. The pigs were not blamed for Page’s death, even after an autopsy found she was a homicide victim and had died of asphyxiation.
*A study done by the New York Times identified 29 cases in Texas since 2015 where people stopped breathing and died after a struggle with pigs. These murders happened throughout Texas, mainly outside major cities. No cops were charged in any of these instances. More than half of those killed were white, the rest were largely Latino, and three were Black. Robert Geron Miller, 38, was in the Texas Tarrant County jail in July 2019 when guards violently threw him to the ground. After complaining of chest pain Miller was blasted with pepper spray and dragged facedown to a cell. Twelve minutes later guards noted that Miller had stopped breathing. But a medical examiner said his death had been caused by a sickle cell crisis!
The Lancet finding of 31,000 police murders in 40 years means an average of 750 people killed per year but there are certainly even MORE murders by the police not included in the study’s statistics. What is so important about the Times finding is that it shows how often police murders are covered up by the medical examiners and coroners.
In 2015, the Washington Post began to log every fatal shooting in the U.S. by an on-duty cop and found there have been more than 5,000 such murders in five years—an average of 1,000 people killed by the police every year. The latest figures are from September 30, 2021—showing that 937 people have been killed by the police so far, an average of 104 per month. There are three more months left in 2021. And even this database, which relies primarily on news accounts, social media postings and police reports, does not include other murders by the police.
This is a system that uses its armed enforcers to keep the people down, to keep the oppressive status quo of poverty, inequality, and racism in place, to come down on any who dare to resist. Such violence and crimes against the people can only be ended by putting an end to this system through an actual revolution.