[News] Harvard Medical Scientists Say Police Killings Should Be Recorded As Public Epidemic

[Anti-Imperialist News]

  Harvard Medical Scientists Say Police Killings Should Be Recorded As
  Public Epidemic

Dylan Sevett <http://usuncut.com/author/dylan/> | December 27, 2015
*http://usuncut.com/black-lives-matter/harvard-medical-police-killings-public-epidemic/*
------------------------------------------------------------------------

“No act of Congress is needed. No police department need be involved.”

Harvard researchers have called on US Public Health Agencies to consider 
police killings and police deaths public health issues. With that 
request, researches are also echoing numerous activists who are urging 
them to begin tracking the number of people killed by police.

The proposal was inspired by a year of continuous protests and public 
pressure from the #BlackLivesMatter 
<http://usuncut.com/category/black-lives-matter/> movement, which 
stemmed from the murder of unarmed Michael Brown on August 9, 2014, and 
the consistent police murders and protests that have happened since.

As there are no official numbers, the best available data comes from 
independent news agencies like the Guardian (UK), who reported 
that 1,058 Americans have been killed by police in 2015. For African 
Americans, the number of law enforcement-related deaths per capita is 
twice as high as it is in the white population.

Their project, “The Counted 
<http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/01/the-counted-police-killings-us-database>” 
also indicates that US civilians are killed by police at an average of 
about three times a day. It includes cases of police who kill armed 
suspects, which many vocal police supporters consider justified without 
carefully examining the situation.

The Summary Points of the proposal from Harvard outline both the problem 
and a solution:

  *

        During the past year, the United States has experienced major
        controversies—and civil unrest—regarding the endemic problem of
        police violence and police deaths.

  *

        Although deaths of police officers are well documented, no
        reliable official US data exist on the number of persons killed
        by the police, in part because of long-standing and
        well-documented resistance of police departments to making these
        data public.

  *

        These deaths, however, are countable, as evidenced by “/The
        Counted/,” which revealed that over 500 people in the US had
        been killed by the police between January 1 and June 9, 2015,
        twice what would be expected based on estimates from the US
        Federal Bureau of Intelligence (FBI).

  *

        Law-enforcement–related deaths, of both persons killed by law
        enforcement agents and also law enforcement agents killed in the
        line of duty, are a public health concern, not solely a criminal
        justice concern, since these events involve mortality and affect
        the well-being of the families and communities of the deceased;
        therefore, law-enforcement–related deaths are public health
        data, not solely criminal justice data.

  *

        We propose that law-enforcement–related deaths be treated as a
        notifiable condition, which would allow public health
        departments to report these data in real-time, at the local as
        well as national level, thereby providing data needed to
        understand and prevent the problem.

Making police killings a notifiable condition would require Police 
Departments to report each killing to their corresponding Public Health 
Department. Medical and public health professionals would then report 
law-enforcement related deaths in real time.

Researchers say this is critical for the well being of the public, and 
that since efforts over the past century have been unsuccessful, it is 
imperative that the government treat law-enforcement related deaths as 
reportable conditions.

They even mention how absurd it is that in the US, we have to rely on a 
UK newspaper to count the number of people being killed by police. The 
US public health system already reports 
<http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6447md.htm?s_cid=mm6447md_w> 
numerous notifiable diseases nationally and in real time.

Predictably, police organizations attacked the idea with 
typical rhetoric. Common Health reports 
<http://commonhealth.wbur.org/2015/12/police-killings-public-health> 
that Bill Johnson, the executive director of the National Association of 
Police Organizations, said he thinks it’s “misguided” and added, “The 
best way to reduce the number of deaths by police is to follow the 
instructions of the officer in any kind of confrontation. I don’t have a 
lot of hope that academics from Harvard would publicize that as an easy 
and quick way to reduce deaths by police.”

Of course the Public Health Department’s counting of law enforcement 
related deaths would be separate from any investigation. All that is 
being proposed is an official count, something that the public can rely 
upon to get real-time alerts about police killings.

The proposal mentions US Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s statement that 
the DOJ will begin piloting its own system 
<http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/05/justice-department-trials-system-count-killings-us-law-enforcement-the-counted> 
based on “The Counted” to keep track of “officer-related deaths,” and 
then “move towards verifying facts about the incident by surveying local 
police departments, medical examiner’s offices, and investigative offices.”

Researchers write 
<http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1001915> that 
this underlines the need for a public health approach. A credible source 
of data and verification is all the more important if the proposed DOJ 
pilot is successful, and continues through the next 2016 election.

Law enforcement agencies have failed to properly report police killings 
for an entire century, so why should the public trust them to do it now?

-- 
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863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org
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