Study: 55% of people killed by police don't get logged as such in official reports.

[DetlefK]

https://www.salon.com/2017/10/12/study-american-police-killings-have-been-drastically-underestimated/

A Harvard University study has revealed that more than half of all police killings in the U.S. in 2015 had been reported incorrectly and thus were not classified as such. In these cases, citizens who were killed in an altercation with law enforcement were mislabeled and thus not recorded as having died at the hands of law enforcement.

...

The Guardian began tracking police killings with "an interactive, crowdsourced database" called "The Counted" in 2015. The Harvard study used data collected by The Counted and compared it with the National Vital Statistics System (NVSS), a dataset used by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The NVSS data "was found to have misclassified 55.2 percent of all police killings, with the errors occurring disproportionately in low-income jurisdictions," The Guardian reported.

...

Generally, the onus is on local medical examiners and coroners to mark cause-of-death in the correct category. This information is recorded on death certificates and then sent to the CDC.

The Harvard study found that the "legal intervention" category had been misused. The Guardian elaborated:

To assess how accurately that classification was being used, the team took the 1,146 police-related deaths recorded by The Counted in 2015, removed 60 cases that did not fit the criteria of the CDC’s “legal intervention” category and requested death certificate data for the remaining 1,086 individuals. They found that a majority, 599 deaths, were classified as resulting from something other than legal intervention – principally “assault.”

Accuracy varied between states. For example, in Washington state, 17.6 percent of cases that should been ticked as deaths due to "legal intervention" (read: deaths at the hands of police) were misclassified. In Oklahoma, 100 percent were.

...

The problem is unique to law enforcement-related deaths. A 2014 study of homicides showed that 99 percent were recorded accurately on death certificates, The Guardian reported.

[Wounded Bear]

1. Congressional Repubs have been fighting for years to suppress that data...

Stands to reason. There's an old expression we used in quality control: "That which is monitored improves." Which goes back to the old definition of a conscience as that little voice in your head saying, "Somebody is watching."

[Wellstone ruled]

3. The dirty secret that

the Media will not touch.

[Iggo]

2. Oops?

[Runningdawg]

4. Oklahoma We're #1!!!

Not the least bit surprised.

[Solly Mack]

5. K&R

I'm not surprised but I am no less disgusted.