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Let’s Talk About Police Brutality Against Hispanic and Latin Americans
Speaking with members of our community I was asked several times about why we rarely see reports of police brutality cases against Hispanics and Latin Americans in the United States. It was a difficult question to answer because there are plenty of studies that have been done on the topic, they just haven't been reported on by media outlets on a large scale. An intriguing anomaly that sparked my interest when discussing police misconduct towards people of color.
I’ve been a supporter of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement since it began. I know why it exists. I understand the pain of the families. I’ve been there. I’ve seen first-hand how police treat people of color. BLM has supported us and they’ve supported white families who were victimized by police brutality as well. To think otherwise means your not paying attention.
But we, as Hispanic and Latin American people, need to dig deeper than just looking at who supports us and who doesn’t in such trying times. One study that caught my attention is the ongoing Fatal Interactions with Police (FIPS) research project. The project includes contributions from public health and biostatistics experts at hospitals and universities, including Saint Louis University, New York University, and Harvard University.
One of the most alarming statistics that stood out to me in the first study was that nearly 60 percent of black women killed by police were unarmed at the time of the interaction. A statistic that increases the odds for unarmed black Americans to be killed by police to an astounding 7 to 1 (more than double the odds found in research to date).
The study was conducted using hierarchical linear models after identifying 1,762 fatal interactions with police that occurred over a 20-month time period and merged them with the nationally representative Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics survey, Uniform Crime Reports data, and census characteristics. The FIPS database includes details of the fatal interactions from May 2013 to January 2015 occurring in jurisdictions across the United States.
The study then estimates the demographic odds of a fatality occurring during an interaction with police based on the location of the interaction and the…
