Report: Police killings are the leading cause of death among Black men
9th December 2019 · 0 Comments
By Frederick H. Lowe
Contributing Writer
(Special from BlackmansStreet.Today) — Police violence is the leading cause of death among young men, especially young Black men, according to scientific report published recently.
The study, which looked at police use of force, found that Black men are 2.5 times more likely to be killed by police than white men.
“Our models predict that 1 in 1000 Black men boys will be killed by police over the life course,” the report said.
The report titled “Risk of being killed by police use of force in the United States by age, race-ethnicity, and sex” reported that 1 in every 1,000 Black men can expected to be killed by police. In 2018, police killed 1,018 people, according to the database “People Killed by Police.”
The report is contained in PNAS, which is published by the National Academy of Sciences.
“Police in the United States kill far more people than do police in other advanced countries industrial democracies,” PNAS reported.
The report listed the names Oscar Grant, Michael Brown, Charleena Lyles, Stephon Clark and Tamir Rice and many others who have been murdered by the police.
The killings have sparked protests and the U.S. Attorney General William Barr angrily reacted.
Earlier this month, at an awards ceremony in Washington honoring policing, Barr warned that critics of policing must display more deference or risk losing police protection.
The PNAS report challenged the widely held belief pushed by corporate media that the murders of young Black men were committed by other young Black men but in reality it’s the police who are the killers.
The murders also affect Black men’s mental health and reinforces inequality in society between Blacks and whites, according to The Lancet, a peer-reviewed medical journal. In a report titled “Police killings and their spillover effects on the mental health of Black Americans: a population-based, quasi-experimental study” reported that police killings of Black men have a spillover effect on the mental health of people not directly affected.
“Our estimates therefore suggest that the population mental health burden from police killings among Black Americans is nearly as large as the mental health burden associated with diabetes,” The Lancet wrote.
“Violent encounters with the police have profound effects on health, neighborhoods, life changes and politics. Policing plays a key role in maintaining structural inequalities between people of color and white people in the United States,” the study reported. “Our results show that people of color face a higher likelihood of being killed by police than do white men and women, that risk peaks in young adulthood, and that young men of color face a nontrivial lifetime risk of being killed by the police.”
PNAS researchers from Rutgers University, Washington University and the University of Michigan estimated the risk of being killed by race and sex using data from 2013 to 2018.
This article originally published in the December 9, 2019 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
