More than half of police killings in the US were misclassified between 1980 and 2018

New York – According to a new study, more than half of police killings in the United States between 1980 and 2018 were mislabeled.

According to the research, which was conducted by the University of Washington and published in the British medical journal The Lancet, the racial disparity in police-involved deaths is also highlighted.

Nearly 31,000 people of all races died from police violence during that nearly 40-year period, according to researchers. More than 55 percent of them were misreported or mislabeled — more specifically as having nothing to do with police violence, researchers discovered.

The study also suggests Black Americans are 3.5 times more likely to die in a police-involved killing than white Americans.

“I think for a long time, people have understood that there has been mislabeling, mischaracterizations and sometimes just avoiding the actual and true data as it relates to police killings, particularly in the Black and brown communities. So it’s not a shocking result of finding,” Marq Claxton, a former NYPD officer, and director of public relations and political affairs for the Black Law Enforcement Alliance, said.

After months of negotiating the new study comes on the heels of police reform talks breaking down in Congress.

According to Claxton, nearly every reform package that has been proposed includes some component that involves additional reporting and auditing of information that comes from police agencies. He believes the mislabeling of police killings is “definitely still happening.”