By Sam Levin\The Guardian
Photos: Wikimedia Commons\YouTube Screenshots
The crisis of US police shootings has been increasingly well-documented by advocates and journalists, with data now suggesting officers fatally shoot an average of more than three people every day.
Since George Floyd’s murder four years ago, there has been growing scrutiny of a more hidden epidemic of police violence: deaths at the hands of officers who did not use guns. An Associated Press investigation in March found that more than 1,000 people died in US police custody from 2012 to 2021 after officers used “less lethal” tactics, including pinning victims face down and stunning them with Tasers.
In hundreds of those cases, medical officials deemed the deaths “accidents” or “natural” despite officers’ use of force.
Dr Roger A Mitchell Jr, former chief medical examiner of Washington DC, has become a leading voice in the push to uncover the true scale of these fatalities. In his book Death in Custody published last year, he and co-author Jay Aronson, founder of Carnegie Mellon’s center for human rights science, lay out the nation’s systemic failure to track deaths caused by police and correctional officers. The book scrutinizes bias in death investigations, exploring how coroners and medical examiners have produced autopsies that minimized or erased the role of police, and in effect, blamed victims for their own deaths.
Mitchell has worked with victims’ families, testified in Congress and in high-profile criminal trials and reviewed “accidental” deaths that he determined should have been labeled police “homicides”. Now chief medical officer for ambulatory care at Howard University, Mitchell spoke with the Guardian about the lack of progress since Floyd’s killing and his proposed solutions. READ MORE…
