Police violence the sixth leading cause of death for young men in the US

Gary Joad & Kate Randall 

The killing of young men by police in America is a health emergency. Much attention has been given to the rise in recent years of “deaths of despair”—due to drug overdose, alcohol abuse and suicide. However, a recent study ranks police killings of young men as the sixth leading cause of death for young men in the US, regardless of race.

The study was published August 5 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) by Rutgers University Newark, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and Washington University in St. Louis. It concludes: “Risk of being killed by police peaks between the ages of 20 years and 35 years for men and women and for all racial and ethnic groups.”

The study’s authors, Frank Edwards, Hedwig Lee and Michael Esposito, note that no agency of the government tracks or compiles an official count of peoples’ deaths at the hands of law enforcement. The findings on police “use-of-force” deaths in the study are gleaned by journalists from public records and news accounts and tabulated at the Fatal Encounters web site.

According to the Mapping Police Violence web site, 1,164 people were killed by police in 2018. According to the Washington Post’s Fatal Force tally, there were only 22 days in all of last year in which police didn’t kill someone.

The study’s authors also point to a commonly recognized phenomenon: “Police in the United States kill far more people than do police in other advanced industrial democracies.” Deaths due to police violence have increased a staggering 50 percent since 2008.

The study estimated an overall annual mortality rate from police violence of 1.8 per 100,000 for all men ages 25 to 29, in sixth place among all causes of death.

Number one was a catch-all category of accidental causes (such as drug overdose, motor vehicular accidents, and other fatal accidents), standing at 76.6 per 100,000.

Suicides account for 26.7 deaths per 100,000, homicides 22.0 per 100,000, heart disease 7.0 per 100,000, and cancer 6.3 per 100,000. It is a grim fact of life in America that the top three causes of death for young men involve so-called “deaths of despair” (drug overdoses and suicide) and homicides.

The mortality rate for women from police violence stands at 0.08 per 100,000 annually and does not rank in the 15 leading causes of death in young women.

Deaths caused by law enforcement actions were compiled for the study using data from 2013 to 2018. The authors found that about 52 of every 100,000 men and boys in the United States will be killed by police use of force over their lifetime. This compares to about 3 of every 100,000 women and girls that will meet the same fate. Latino men and boys have about a 53 per 100,000 risk of death by police, similar to the overall risk for men and boys.

The study confirms that black men have about 2.5 times the life risk of being killed by police than white men. Native American men have a lifetime risk of death by law enforcement between 1.2 to 1.7 times that of white men, and Native American women have a lifetime risk of a police-caused death 1.1 to 2.1 times that of white women.

The authors make the false claim that “Policing plays a key role in maintaining structural inequalities between people of color and white people in the United States.” While the police killings of African Americans, Latinos and Native Americans are disproportionate in relation to their percentage in the population, the greatest number of people killed in police shootings are white. Moreover, while this issue is not addressed in the study, other studies have shown that black police are just as likely to kill, and just as likely to kill black men, as white police.