Report: US Police Kill Twice the Amount Previously Thought

A new university report shows how American police are much more lethal than previously reported

It has long been an accepted fact that American police kill more people each year than do police from any other wealthy nation in the world. The grizzly number of people killed by police officers in the U.S. that has accepted in recent years by consensus is around 1,000 per year.

That level of police killing is awful enough, of course. At that rate U.S. police kill 10 times per capita than the police of France do, 60 times more than those killed by British police, and 30 times more than German police do. By any measure, American policing is uniquely lethal and brutal.

This fits nicely into the overall authoritarian carceral state in which American policing operates, which sees our relatively small nation jail more people in total and per capita than any other nation on earth. American police kill and lock up more people each year than any other nation on earth, according to all conservative estimates.

It turns out matters are much worse than we thought. A report recently published by the Raza Database Project argues that American police killings have been seriously underreported. In fact, the report out of California State University, San Bernadino says that American police actually kill double the amount of people per year we’d previously thought they did.

“The greatest number of these new deaths come from people who died while already in police custody, including many who had been falsely listed as having died from ‘medical emergencies.’ This research shows that the number of people killed by police in the United States is likely almost double what is normally reported by the media,” Left Voice, summarizes.

Latin victims have gone particularly underreported in past counts of American police killings. The report estimates that the amount of Latin people actually killed by American police each year is 25% higher than previously reported.

The amount of Asian and Pacific Islanders killer by American police, however, is 600% higher than previously reported, according to closer inspection from the report. The report does not classify victims of police killings by class but it is clear from the examination of the data in it that people of color are disproportionately killed by American police, much in the same way that we are disproportionately imprisoned.

Read the entire report, here.