55k+ Americans Injured, Killed by Police in a Year

Local Editor

More than 55,000 Americans were either killed or injured by US police in just one year, a new study revealed. Most of the deaths were from fatal firearm wounds or excessive use of taser devices.

The study, titled 'Perils of police action: a cautionary tale from US data sets,' covers the year 2012 and offers greater context to the issue of police brutality, which has only grown bigger in the four years since the research.

Published in the peer-reviewed British medical journal Injury Prevention, the study found that a total of 55,400 people were victims of police officers' "abuse of power" or "loss of control out of anger or fear" in 2012.

Among them, 1,063 people were either shot or tasered to death by law enforcement, out of an estimated 12.3 million arrests or stop-and-search incidents.

The research found that the numbers aren't distributed evenly when it comes to race, ethnicity, or age.

"Blacks, Native Americans and Hispanics had higher stop/arrest rates per 10,000 population than white non-Hispanics and Asians," the study's authors stated.

"Given a national history of racism, the excess per capita death rate of blacks from US police action rightly concerns policy analysts, advocates and the press," the study added.

"The excess appears to reflect exposure. Blacks are arrested more often than whites, and youth more often than the elderly."

However, the study found that when black people are stopped or arrested by US police, they are "no more likely" than white people to be killed during that incident.

Source: News Agencies, Edited by website team