January 1, Report: over 17,000 deaths caused by police misclassified since 1980

A new report uncovered troubling statistics regarding police-involved deaths.

According to an article published in The Lancet, researchers found that 55.5% of deaths from police violence between 1980 and 2018 were misclassified in the U.S. National Vital Statistics System, which tracks information from death certificates.

“For most causes of death, the death certificate filled out by a physician is sort of the gold standard,” said study author Chris Murray of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington. “There is a pretty systematic underrecording of police violence deaths. “

However, one criminology expert is dubious of the findings.

“My concerns with this paper are the same as many that use these crowd-sourced databases,” said Justin Nix, associate professor of criminology at the University of Nebraska. “I’m not saying we don’t need to track that in these sorts of databases, but I’m just saying that all police killings are not created equally.”

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More than 17,000 deaths caused by police have been misclassified since 1980