Afro-Americans: The target of police shootings?

We all are sitting in our homes owing to the terror of the Coronavirus. Considering life as the most precious thing, our governments have even decided to bear the cost of millions of citizens to protect this precious commodity. It is good to follow precautions as we do care about our families and community. However, the statistics are quite astonishing that the death toll due to hunger every year is double the number of deaths caused by this pandemic. The World Health Organisation(WHO) doesn’t pay heed to hunger with this seriousness. Adding to this, according to a database maintained by The Washington Post, more than 1000 people die in the United States every year in police shootings. The main question tearing every eardrum is why the loss of life treated differently owing to its backstory?

African-Americans are at higher risk of being killed by police, even though they are less likely to pose a real threat to law enforcement, according to new data-driven research by Northeastern professor Matt Miller. Hispanics are also more likely to be victims of police shootings. Matt Miller, a professor of Health Sciences and Epidemiology at Northeastern University who has been researching injury and violence prevention for two decades, asserted, “One in 15 firearm deaths is at the hands of police; among African-Americans, it’s about one in 10. It doesn’t imply that these shootings are all unjustified. But it sure makes you feel like we should try hard to figure out how to use less lethal ways of arresting someone’s threatening behaviour.”

The researchers spent two years analysing the two-year database of 603 firearm homicides by police and tagged and coded the narratives to put each shooting into context. They weren’t short in running the detailed results through a computer program. The seven subtypes of police shootings categorised victims who were armed (with guns or knives) or unarmed, victims who were violent or non-violent, and other crucial details. Among those who were unarmed and appeared to show no objective threat to police, nearly two-thirds of the victims were Hispanic or Black. Miller noted that none of the seven categories accounted for “suicide by cop,” in which victims seek to end their own lives by willfully provoking a police shooting. Instead, suicidal people were distributed across all seven categories.

Harminder Singh