A couple of stunning reports have been published over the past few days that, contrary to popular propaganda belief, tell us that cops have killed more Americans than wars (if one doesn’t take into account the hundreds of thousands of people, other than U.S. soldiers killed in action, that have died), and our “new normal” economy has “killed” more Americans than cops (a 5%+ uptick in suicides since 2008, which amounts to an additional 1,800+/- deaths per year, in the U.S., alone; which also includes 18 to 22 suicides of U.S. veterans, daily).
The status quo’s oppression—and, yes, outright, state-sponsored murder and negligent manslaughter--in its many ugly forms, regrettably, is not the new normal. It’s the old normal. What’s “new” here is that at least a few more people are finally beginning to see it for what it is.
From The Guardian, yesterday …
Police killed more than twice as many people as reported by US government
As Obama calls for better data and Justice Department exposes Ferguson, trusted FBI count of ‘justifiable homicides’ omits 545 people per year in study
Tom McCarthy in New York
The Guardian
Wednesday 4 March 2015 11.28 EST
(Last modified on Wednesday 4 March 2015 12.43 EST)
An average of 545 people killed by local and state law enforcement officers in the US went uncounted in the country’s most authoritative crime statistics every year for almost a decade, according to a report released on Tuesday.
The first-ever attempt by US record-keepers to estimate the number of uncounted “law enforcement homicides” exposed previous official tallies as capturing less than half of the real picture. The new estimate – an average of 928 people killed by police annually over eight recent years, compared to 383 in published FBI data – amounted to a more glaring admission than ever before of the government’s failure to track how many people police kill.
The revelation called into particular question the FBI practice of publishing annual totals of “justifiable homicides by law enforcement” – tallies that are widely cited in the media and elsewhere as the most accurate official count of police homicides.
The new estimates added crucial framing to a criminal justice crisis in the US that was coming into sharp focus this week. A Justice Department report expected to be published on Wednesday exposed serial civil rights abuses by police in Ferguson, Missouri. On Monday, the president’s taskforce on policing issued recommendations for better data collection as part of a call for top-to-bottom criminal justice reform…
While the story continues on to report upon
President Obama’s observations, on Monday, that
“There was a great emphasis on the need to collect more data,” The Guardian emphasizes…
…Obama did not, perhaps, capture just how bad the information was that the country has been working with. Independent tallies had previously indicated that the FBI’s “justifiable homicide” counts were flawed. But until recently, the FBI discouraged challenges to its numbers, insisting that they were carefully audited – and pointing out that the bureau, in any case, was required by law to publish them.
Tuesday’s bureau of justice statistics (BJS) Deaths Program Data Quality Profile&utm_campaign=juststats report, produced in collaboration with RTI International, the research institute, explodes the notion – if its findings are accurate – that the figures the FBI publishes annually are anything other than hugely misleading…
I strongly recommend a read of this entire story. (Link is up above.)
Here at Daily Kos, new Kossack revmcpherson published an excellent diary on Tuesday about this: “Police Kill More Americans than War.” (Please rec it up!)
From ScienceBlog.com, a week ago…
Suicide rates rising for older US adults
ScienceBlog.com
February 27, 2015
Suicide rates for adults between 40 and 64 years of age in the U.S. have risen about 40% since 1999, with a sharp rise since 2007. One possible explanation could be the detrimental effects of the economic downturn of 2007-2009, leading to disproportionate effects on house values, household finances, and retirement savings for that age group. In a study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, researchers found that external economic factors were present in 37.5% of all completed suicides in 2010, rising from 32.9% in 2005.
In addition, suffocation, a method more likely to be used in suicides related to job, economic, or legal factors, increased disproportionately among the middle-aged. The number of suicides using suffocation increased 59.5% among those aged 40-64 years between 2005 and 2010, compared with 18.0% for those aged 15-39 years and 27.2% for aged >65 years.
“Relative to other age groups, a larger and increasing proportion of middle-aged suicides have circumstances associated with job, financial, or legal distress and are completed using suffocation,” noted study authors Katherine A. Hempstead, PhD, Director of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Princeton, NJ, and the Center for State Health Policy at Rutgers University, and Julie A. Phillips, PhD, Institute for Health, Health Care Policy and Aging Research, New Brunswick, NJ. “The sharpest increase in external circumstances appears to be temporally related to the worst years of the Great Recession, consistent with other work showing a link between deteriorating economic conditions and suicide. External circumstances also have increased in importance among those aged ?65 years. Financial difficulties related to the loss of retirement savings in the stock market crash may explain some of this trend.”…
Every once in awhile, I publish something here that highlights realities in our society that are beyond anything that words can convey. This is definitely one of those moments!
(Sometimes, when it comes to posting diaries here, "less is more.")
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