Citation

The editors. Lancet 2021; 398(10307): 1195.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2021, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/S0140-6736(21)02145-0

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Preventable violent deaths of people of colour at the hands of police in the USA have been overlooked as a public health issue. Many victims of police violence have become household names, like George Floyd, whose death made headlines worldwide and raised awareness of the Black Lives Matter movement, which targets structural racism and violence against Black people in the USA and abroad. Yet, for every George Floyd, hundreds of other Americans' deaths after violent exchanges with police go unheeded, unacknowledged, and uncounted.

Although the US federal government has tracked deaths from law enforcement since 1949 using the National Vital Statistics System (NVSS), questions around undercounting of police violence fatalities and the underlying quality of death certificate data have arisen only in recent years. Journalists have not only documented narratives of police brutality but also identified disparities in the total number of deaths reported in the NVSS, especially when non-firearm injuries were involved or when information about the individual's race or ethnicity was missing or misclassified. Open-source databases composed of news coverage and public records of police violence fatalities maintained by journalists and independent research teams, including Fatal Encounters, Mapping Police Violence, and The Counted, have provided rich alternatives to NVSS data, but are limited by short periods of coverage and differences in case definitions.A lack of accurate data has arguably been one of the major impediments to adopting a public health approach to deaths caused by police violence...

Language: en