摘要：Objectives. To update previous examinations of racial/ethnic disparities in the use of lethal force by US police. Methods. I examined online national vital statistics data for deaths assigned an underlying cause of “legal intervention” ( International Classification of Diseases, 10th Revision, external-cause-of-injury codes Y35.0–Y35.7, excluding Y35.5 [legal execution]) for the 5-year period 2010 to 2014. Results. Death certificates identified 2285 legal intervention deaths (1.5 per million population per year) from 2010 to 2014. Among males aged 10 years or older, who represented 96% of these deaths, the mortality rate among non-Hispanic Black and Hispanic individuals was 2.8 and 1.7 times higher, respectively, than that among White individuals. Conclusions. Substantial racial/ethnic disparities in legal intervention deaths remain an ongoing problem in the United States. A recent report by Fryer on racial/ethnic disparities in the use of force by police in selected cities in the United States attracted widespread publicity, largely because of its unexpected finding of no statistically significant differences in the use of lethal force by police during encounters with White, Black, or Hispanic individuals. 1,2 A different conclusion is apparent when a population-level perspective is taken. That approach aims to identify all such deaths in a population and reflects not only the outcomes of police encounters, the focus of Fryer’s investigation, 1 but also the likelihood of police encounters. That difference matters. For example, Sikora and Mulvihill 3 examined national vital statistics data and found that during 1988 to 1997, the rate of deaths resulting from legal interventions by police or other law enforcement agents among males aged 10 years or older was more than 3 times greater among Black than among White persons. More recently, DeGue et al. 4 studied data from 17 states from 2009 to 2012 from the National Violent Death Reporting System and found that mortality rates were 2.8 times higher among Black than among White individuals for deaths resulting from the use of force by law enforcement. For 2013, Crosby and Lyons 5 observed a 4-fold higher rate of legal intervention deaths among Black men compared with White men, with Hispanic men having intermediate rates, with data from the same system. This article provides an update on racial/ethnic disparities in legal intervention deaths nationwide.
