In Interactions With Law Enforcement, Black Males More Likely to Suffer Severe Injury

(Reuters Health) – Black males are more likely than whites to be hospitalized with gunshot wounds and other severe injuries suffered during law enforcement interactions, a new study suggests.

The analysis of data from the American College of Surgeons Trauma Quality Improvement Program (TQIP) found that the number of white individuals who sustained firearm injuries was about twice that of Black individuals, according to the report published in JAMA Surgery. But, given that the white population in the United States is more than five times that of the Black population, Black men were disproportionately likely to be severely injured.

Those injured included both law enforcement officers and suspects, noted study coauthor, Dr. Yan Lee, an assistant professor at the Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut.

“We’re hoping people investigate this more and ask why not only are Black suspects being injured, but also members of law enforcement,” Dr. Lee said.

To look at trends in firearms injuries sustained when the public interacted with law enforcement, the researchers turned to data between 2014 and 2016 from TQIP, which captures a subset of patients who meet certain injury-severity criteria across a nationally representative National Trauma Data Bank.

Lee and her colleagues focused on 1,420 injuries with a description that included the words “legal intervention,” in the external code description. Of those injuries, 1,340 patients (94.4%) were male with a mean age of 35.6. Cause code descriptions listed 935 injuries as involving firearms, 420 injuries with the mechanism “struck by/against,” and 65 with the mechanism described as “other or unspecified.”

A total of 854 cases (60.1%) involved intensive care unit admission, and 892 of the patients were hospitalized for more than three days. A total of 709 patients (49.9%) incurred injuries to the torso and spine, 596 (42%) involved the extremities, and 457 (32.2%) involved the head and neck regions. Among those with head and neck injuries, 338 (74%) sustained a traumatic brain injury.

The largest ethnic/racial group among the 1,420 injured in the study cohort was non-Hispanic white (42.9%). However, across the entire database of 829,805 patients, whites make up 64% of patients, the authors note. Non-Hispanic Black and Hispanic/Latino individuals, who make up 11.5% and 9.5% of the entire database, were disproportionately represented in the study cohort, with Black individuals accounting for 23.1% and Hispanic/Latino individuals accounting for 17.5% of the injured.

In the subset of patients whose role as suspect or law enforcement officer was known, nearly equal proportions were Black: 26.2% of those listed as suspects and 26.0% of those listed as law enforcement officers.

“I am very happy to see this work done,” said Dr. Albert Wu, an internist and a professor of health policy and management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “It begins to fill a gap in information about the interactions between law enforcement and members of the public.”

“This is an important first step,” Dr. Wu said. “Future work should follow the lead of these investigators using nationally representative and standardized databases.”

A clearer picture would involve other sources of information beyond administrative billing data, Dr. Wu said. “It’s important to begin to collect this data, which should be gathered routinely as part of the efforts to improve policing in the United States,” he added.

While the new findings are helpful, from a public health standpoint the more important numbers are rates per capita, said Charles Branas, Gelman Professor and chair of the department of epidemiology at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health in New York City.

The latest census data show that 76.3% of the population is white, while 13.4% are Black, Branas said. Taking that into account, the study shows that Black individuals “are disproportionately injured and threatened,” he added.

To get a better picture of what is going on when the public encounters law enforcement, a larger database needs to be constructed which includes information such as that described in the study along with data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, from the Justice Department, from journalists, and from other sources, Branas said. “Those need to be harmonized into one big database,” he added. “And it needs to be updated every year so we can track what’s happening going forward.”

SOURCE: https://bit.ly/3xRyUQE JAMA Surgery, online May 5, 2021.

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