Not only are the total numbers of police-involved deaths in the US appalling – 1,134 in 2015 alone – the final tally for the year highlighted once again the shockingly disproportionate number of African Americans affected, as was exposed by a Guardian investigation, The Counted. Young black men aged between 15 and 34 accounted for 15% of all deaths logged (five times higher than for their white counterparts), despite being just 2% of the population.
There is another, much less well-documented feature of police brutality and violence: the prevalence of disabled people and, in particular, those with mental difficulties, who are victims.
In an attempt to put the problem on the radar, the Massachusetts-based disability rights non-profit organisation the Ruderman Family Foundation has published an eye-opening paper in which it estimates that a third to half of all people killed by police in the US have a disability. In addition, according to the foundation, almost all well-known and widely reported cases of police violence involve a disabled person.
The report, compiled by David M Perry, a professor of history at Dominican University in Illinois, and long-time disability rights activist Lawrence Carter-Long, makes use of available data (there are no official, comprehensive statistics collected on police-based violence and disability at local, state or federal level) and is a call to action for the media to shine a light on the problem.
After examining coverage over the past three years, Perry and Carter-Long say it is shocking that the prevalence of disability is not being accurately, or commonly, reported. “Media coverage of police violence fails to recognise or report the disability element when Americans are injured or killed by law enforcement, resulting in their stories being segregated from the issue in the media,” they conclude.