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Cops have been killing folks decades before Derek Chauvin. One example is Joseph James DeAngelo, a former cop better known as the Golden State Killer, recently apprehended because of investigative genealogy. Seeing these men as figureheads can also pose a problem —it makes it easier to look at these men as aberrations or anomalies in policing. Because a civilian killed by a police officer is a tragedy. But 17,000 underreported deaths-by-cop is a statistic.
“[S]ystemic misclassification” in the federal database that tracks the causes of death in America has produced, over four decades, an undercount of more than 17,000 deaths at the hands of police. The proportion of undercounted police killings of Black Americans is even more extreme, the research shows, rising to 60 percent.
The Lancet study casts American police, unequivocally, as a threat to public health. The risk of death-by-cop for an American man in 2019, according to the paper, was higher than the risk of death by testicular cancer, appendicitis, or sexually transmitted disease. These dangers weigh disproportionately on the Black community, as the study emphasizes: “The police have disproportionately killed Black people at a rate of 3.5 times higher than white people.”
For the folks who kneeled during the Star Spangled Banner, marched in the streets, and voted with the hope that things would be different, this news should not be shocking. For the people who thought that the protestors were blowing things out of proportion or that the real problem was media saturation, know that “the [federal data] did not report 55.5 percent of all deaths attributable to police violence.” Which is to say, things were actually graver than the data that mobilized people into the streets suggested.
Who will guard the guards themselves is not just a pithy question from antiquity. The answer is probably us, and to do so requires vigilance. I hope we aren’t so caught up in copaganda that we fail to realize that the people walking around with guns can be dangerous, despite their shirts and pants being blue.
Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s. Before that, he wrote columns for an online magazine named The Muse Collaborative under the pen name Knehmo. He endured the great state of Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who cannot swim, a published author on critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at cwilliams@abovethelaw.com.