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US police injured or killed over 55,000 people in 2012: Study

Thursday, 28 July 2016 2:11 PM [ Last Update: Thursday, 28 July 2016 3:17 PM ]

More than 55,000 Americans were either killed or injured by US police in just one year, a new study has revealed.

Over 55,000 people in the United States were either killed or wounded by police in just one year, according to a new study.

The study, published in the peer-reviewed British medical journal Injury Prevention, found that most of the deaths were from fatal firearm wounds or excessive use of taser devices.

"US police killed or injured an estimated 55,400 people in 2012," said Ted Miller of the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation in Maryland, who led the study.

"On an average day, three people die and 150 people are treated at a hospital because they are injured by police," Miller said.

The study said the people who died or were injured were the victims of police officers' “abuse of power” or “loss of control out of anger or fear."

Some 1,063 people were either fatally shot or tasered to death by police in 2012, out of an estimated 12.3 million stops and arrests, the study noted.

The study also found that blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans are more likely to get arrested by police compared to white and Asian people.

"Blacks, Native Americans and Hispanics had higher stop/arrest rates per 10,000 population than white non-Hispanics and Asians," the researchers wrote.

"Those with the highest arrest rates per 10,000 population were ages 15-29 years, black, Latino or Native American," the study noted.

Statistics show that there is a great amount of violence when police stop Americans in general, and it's up to police to reduce that violence, Miller said.

"You and I might get stopped once in our lives. The police stop people every day. They need to be the ones trained to de-escalate," he said. “It's important for people not to make police angry, but it's also important for police to control their emotions.”

The study comes amid renewed outrage over the use of deadly force by police on African-Americans.

Over the past month, thousands of demonstrators flooded the streets of major cities across the country to decry the deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile at the hands of police officers.

According to a new survey, racial tensions in the US are at the highest level since the 1992 Los Angeles riots that were started after a jury acquitted four white police officers of the use of excessive force in the videotaped arrest and beating of African American Rodney King.

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