U.S. data scant on deaths, injuries by law enforcement

While copious data document the career of former 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, few statistics are available on the phenomenon he protested by kneeling during pre-game performances of the national anthem—police killings of African Americans.

Maybe sports fans, with their obsessive love of statistics, could help change this, write Nancy Krieger, professor of social epidemiology at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and co-author Jason Beckfield, Harvard professor and Sociology Department chair, in a New York Daily News op-ed published October 7, 2017.

They invite America’s sports geeks to peruse the statistics on injury and deaths by law enforcement, and compare them to what’s available on athletic teams’ performances from the pros on down to high schoolers.

“Then you might demand that we, as a country, up the analytics—and provide real data, in real time, to make sure we know what the problem is, and where it is, so that we can take steps, together, to document and redress the wrongs we need to right,” they write.

Read New York Daily News op-ed: Police-reform stats fit for sports geeks 

Learn more

More than half of police killings not officially documented on U.S. death certificates (Harvard Chan School news)

Police killings, police deaths a public health issue (Harvard Chan School news)

Call for police killings, police deaths to be reported as notifiable weekly public health data (Harvard Chan School news)