The
U.S. National Vital Statistics System recorded police violence
as playing a role in 13,700 deaths over that period, the study's
authors said. By examining three non-governmental, open-source
databases, they estimated the true total was around 30,800.
The databases they examined were Fatal Encounters, Mapping
Police Violence, and The Counted.
The burden of fatal police violence is an urgent public health
crisis in the United States, said the study published on
Thursday in The Lancet, a major British medical journal.
Deaths at the hands of the police disproportionately impact
people of certain races and ethnicities, pointing to systemic
racism in policing, it added.
Protests broke out last year in the United States following the
death of George Floyd, a Black man who died after a police
officer knelt on his neck for more than 8 minutes, and other
incidents in which police killed Black men and women.
"Proven public health intervention strategies are needed to
address these systematic biases. State-level estimates allow for
appropriate targeting of these strategies to address police
violence and improve its reporting," the study said.
(Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Peter
Graff)
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