In 2018, more than 500 people died of a firearm injury sustained from law enforcement in the United States.1 The American Public Health Association recognizes police violence as a public health crisis.2 This crisis has received national attention in light of recent events, and concerns of systemic racism among law enforcement have been reignited.
Firearms are the second leading cause of pediatric death in the United States, with noted racial and ethnic disparities.3 We sought to measure racial and ethnic differences in adolescent mortality rates related to firearm injury from law enforcement over a 16-year period.
In this cross-sectional study, we used data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Web-Based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System (WISQARS). WISQARS collects data from death certificates compiled by the National Center for Health Statistics. This study included adolescents aged 12 to 17 years who died of firearm injury...
Comments
RE: Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Firearm-Related Pediatric Deaths Related to Legal Intervention
My comments can be summed up in a quote from social scientist David Klinger (2012):
Engel et al.’s (2012) study should be viewed as a stark reminder that criminologists
should take seriously their scientific calling to be skeptical. Doing so will not only permit the
discipline to hew more closely to the scientific ethos of organized skepticism that
Merton (1979) wrote of, but it will also permit the field to enhance its relevancy beyond the
academy. Being appropriately skeptical will permit scholars to provide policy makers with better
information about what is and is not known about what is going on in the realms where they must
make decisions about how best to address critical public policy issues. If the discipline continues
to be satisfied with stopping short of seeking to control comprehensively for factors that could
explain observed relationships and then strongly proclaim causative effects because they fit with
some theoretical/ideological supposition, then the field will remain poorer and it will fail to
fulfill its role as a fair arbiter of intellectual disputes about policy relevant issues.
Klinger, D. (2012). Back to basics: some thoughts on the importance of organized skepticism in criminology and public policy. Criminology and Public Policy, 11(4) p.637-640.