The recently released Raza Database Project has shed light on the potential underreporting of police killings of Brown and Black individuals in the United States. Statistician and demographer Jesus Garcia led a team that merged data sets from various independent research projects on police violence. The aim was to provide a more accurate representation of the ethnicities of victims. The findings suggest that the number of Brown and Black people killed by police may be more than double the widely reported figures.
Garcia described the results as “terrible numbers to look at” and emphasized their stark and bare nature. The lack of federal data collection on police violence makes this research groundbreaking, according to project manager Ivette Xochiyotl Boyzo. She expressed disappointment that there is no official collection of information regarding these types of incidents and called for accountability. Boyzo highlighted the disturbingly high impunity rate as the most concerning aspect of the findings.
