Game. Set. Match.
Academic research provides insights but offers an incomplete picture. A study published in
The New England Journal of Medicine in 2016 finds there were 222 “legal intervention” deaths in 2013, or cases in which someone was killed by an on-duty law enforcement or other peace officer. The study is based on data from just 17 states, however, and none of the largest states — California, Florida, Illinois, New York, Pennsylvania and Texas — were included.
According to the paper, nearly everyone killed by on-duty officers in those states that year were male and between the ages of 20 and 54 years old. It finds that black people were most likely to die in police custody.
“The rates [of death] were higher among non-Hispanic blacks (0.6 per 100,000 population) and Hispanics (0.3 per 100,000) than among non-Hispanic whites (0.1 per 100,000),” the authors write. “Multiple factors were found to be associated with the circumstances of these events, such as a crisis (e.g., the victim had had a bad argument, had divorce papers served, was laid off, faced foreclosure on a house, or had a court date for a legal problem within 2 weeks before the death), a current mental health problem, and intimate partner violence.”
A newer study, published in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2019, estimates that black men have a 1 in 1,000 chance of being killed by police during their lifetimes. That’s 2.5 times the odds for a non-Hispanic white man, the authors find.