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<h1 class="post-title left" itemprop="name headline"><small>Harvard
Medical Scientists Say Police Killings Should Be Recorded As
Public Epidemic</small></h1>
<span class="author-names" itemprop="author"><a
href="http://usuncut.com/author/dylan/" title="Posts by Dylan
Sevett" rel="author">Dylan Sevett</a></span> <span
class="post-date" style="color: #CCC"><font color="#000000">| </font><time
class="post-date updated" itemprop="datePublished"
datetime="2015-12-27" pubdate=""><font color="#000000">December
27, 2015<br>
<b><small><small><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://usuncut.com/black-lives-matter/harvard-medical-police-killings-public-epidemic/">http://usuncut.com/black-lives-matter/harvard-medical-police-killings-public-epidemic/</a></small></small></b></font><br>
</time></span>
<hr style="border: 0;height: 1px;background: #CCC;"> <span
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<p>“No act of Congress is needed. No police department need be
involved.”</p>
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<p>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.</p>
<p>The proposal was inspired by a year of continuous protests and
public pressure from the #<a
href="http://usuncut.com/category/black-lives-matter/"
target="_blank">BlackLivesMatter</a> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Their project, “<a
href="http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/01/the-counted-police-killings-us-database"
target="_blank">The Counted</a>” 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.</p>
<p>The Summary Points of the proposal from Harvard outline both the
problem and a solution:</p>
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<p><span class="s2">During the past year, the United States
has experienced major controversies—and civil
unrest—regarding the endemic problem of police violence
and police deaths.</span></p>
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<li class="li1">
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<p><span class="s2">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.</span></p>
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<p><span class="s2">These deaths, however, are countable, as
evidenced by “<i>The Counted</i>,” 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).</span></p>
</blockquote>
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<li class="li1">
<blockquote>
<p><span class="s2">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.</span></p>
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<p><span class="s4">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.</span></p>
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</ul>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6447md.htm?s_cid=mm6447md_w"
target="_blank">reports</a> numerous notifiable diseases
nationally and in real time.</p>
<p>Predictably, police organizations attacked the idea with
typical rhetoric. Common Health <a
href="http://commonhealth.wbur.org/2015/12/police-killings-public-health"
target="_blank">reports</a> that Bill Johnson, the executive
director of the National Association of Police Organizations, said
he thinks it’s “misguided” and added, <span class="s1">“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.”</span></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p class="p1">The proposal mentions US Attorney General Loretta
Lynch’s statement that the DOJ will begin piloting its own <a
href="http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/05/justice-department-trials-system-count-killings-us-law-enforcement-the-counted"
target="_blank">system</a> based on “The Counted” to keep
track of “officer-related deaths,” and then “move <span
class="s1">towards verifying facts about the incident by
surveying local police departments, medical examiner’s offices,
and investigative offices.”</span></p>
<p class="p1">Researchers <a
href="http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1001915"
target="_blank">write</a> 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.</p>
<p class="p1">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?</p>
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