New research out of the University of Michigan has found that police are the sixth leading cause of death among young black men.
Researchers behind the study say the findings refute the narrative that police altercations that result in the deaths of black men are isolated cases.
Dr. Michael Esposito is a study author. He said the study included several kinds of death under the umbrella of police use of force.
“We counted shootings, stabbings, asphyxiation. Anything that was police use of force that caused the death of an individual,” Esposito said.
The study used data compiled by Fatal Encounters, a journalist-led effort to track deaths involving police. According to the Fatal Encounters website the group began collecting police data in 2013 after failing to find any national database tracking the number of police involved deaths. So far, Fatal Encounters has a record of 26,218 police involved deaths between January 1st, 2000, and June 28, 2019.
“How our civilians and how are police are interacting is kind of broken right?” Esposito said. “No other industrial democracy has numbers that even approach this.”
Esposito’s study found that 100 of every 100,000 black men will die in a police interaction, roughly two and a half times higher than white men.
Police use-of-force was the sixth most common cause of death among young black men, behind suicide, homicide, and heart disease.
“It’s not a thing that’s really rare and that we can just ignore,” Esposito said. “So if we did intervene to make these interactions less common then we would actually be doing quite a bit of service to improve health... on a population scale.”
Other minority groups with a high rates of death from police use of force were Latino, at a rate of 53 per 100,000, and American Indian/Native Alaskan, at a rate of 55 per 100,000.
Esposito said police vehicle chases resulting in death were not included in their calculations. He said if they had been included the risk of death for all groups of women would have doubled.