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 The majority of those injured were young, uninsured males with minor
wounds resulting from being struck, according to data from 2006 to
2012.
“There has been a lot of attention around deaths involving police
during the past few years, and deaths represent the tip of a larger
iceberg,” said lead study author Elinore Kaufman of New-York
Presbyterian Hospital.
“The numbers indicate that it’s a longer-term phenomenon with
consistent numbers each year,” she told Reuters Health. “We wanted
to understand the broad national view, and next we want to look
locally at cities and communities to get a sense of what’s working
well in some places.”
Kaufman and colleagues analyzed the Nationwide Emergency Department
Sample to find injuries marked with a legal intervention code,
meaning law enforcement was involved in the incident. They found a
total of 355,677 emergency department visits for legal-intervention
injuries between 2006 and 2012. Just 0.3 percent of these resulted
in death.
Of all the cases, more than 80 percent of patients were men and the
average age was 32. Most lived in zip codes with median household
incomes less than the national average and about 80 percent lived in
urban areas. Overall, legal intervention injuries were more common
in the South and West than in the Northeast and Midwest.
About 98 percent of the injuries were considered minor, and they
resulted from being struck or hit, with gunshot and stab wounds
accounting for less than 7 percent. About 20 percent of patients had
a mental illness and 16 percent of cases included codes for
intoxication, with 10 percent involving alcohol and 6 percent
involving other substances.
“This study looks at the overall count of injuries, but what we
should also look at is exposure,” said Ted Miller of the Pacific
Institute for Research and Evaluation in Calverton, Maryland, who
wasn’t involved in the study.
“How many people are arrested versus those who are stopped by police
and not arrested, and how does that differ by demographics such as
race and ethnicity?” he told Reuters Health.
One limitation of the study is that medical coding doesn’t explain
the nuance of the situation, and some patients had no cause of
injury noted, the authors write in JAMA Surgery. Also, the data
don’t include race, ethnicity or geographic areas smaller than
region.
“It is difficult to know how to interpret the data. It is unknown
the extent to which the medical staff write, for example, ‘patient
fell and struck head on pavement’ versus ‘patient fell and struck
head on pavement while resisting arrest,’” said Catherine Barber of
the Harvard Injury Control Research Center in Boston who wasn’t
involved with the study.
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Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates
80,000 to 100,000 nonfatal legal intervention-related injuries per
year from 2006 to 2015. Although the numbers are higher, they also
show a stable trend during the past decade, Barber said by email.
“A lot has happened in law enforcement since 2006, such as in-car
cameras, body-worn cameras, wider use of tasers, internal use of
force tracking, development of crisis intervention teams and
de-escalation training,” said David Zack, president of the New York
State Association of Chiefs of Police based in Schenectady and Chief
of the Cheektowaga, New York Police Department.
“All have contributed to a reduction in the use of force,” he said.
“An enormous amount of police reform has been undertaken over the
last decade. Why ignore it?” Zack, who was not involved in the
study, told Reuters Health by email.
“The data does not support the narrative in recent years that police
are out of control in their use of force,” said Darrel Stephens,
executive director of the Major Cities Chiefs Association and former
Chief of Police of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department in
North Carolina.
“Police continue to work on reducing the use of force, and there
have been significant improvements in most cities during the past 20
years,” said Stephens, who wasn’t involved in the study. “But police
are given the authority to use force because some people will not
comply with legal demands and submit peacefully to arrest.”
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2o9UDU3 JAMA Surgery, online April 19, 2017.
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