POLICE WORK IS BENEFICIAL FOR THE HOSPITAL BUSINESS

Research study found that between 2006 and 2012 more than 51,000 people a year were hospitalized with police inflicted injuries

By Mia de Graaf

Daily Mail
April 19, 2017

More than 50,000 people a year are hospitalized with injuries inflicted by law enforcement, a landmark study reveals.

The figure remained steady from 2006 to 2012, laying bare a long-term issue with violent conflicts between police and public in the build-up to the Black Lives Matter movement.

The study, published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found the majority of cases involved people being struck or beaten by officers.

Most cases involved people with mental illness.

More than 80 percent of patients were low-income men, with an average age of 32, living in urban areas.

Injuries were far more common in the South and West than in the Northeast and West.

The report by New York-Presbyterian Hospital Weill Cornell Medicine used data from the Nationwide Emergency Department Sample, a nationally representative sample of emergency department visits.

During this time period, there were 355,677 emergency department visits for injuries by law enforcement.

Of these visits, 0.3 percent (1,202 cases) resulted in death.

Most injuries by law enforcement resulted from being struck, with gunshot and stab wounds accounting for fewer than seven percent. Most injuries were minor.

Drug abuse was common in patients injured by police.

'We found these frequencies [approximately 51,000 ED visits per year] to be stable over 7 years, indicating that this has been a longer-term phenomenon,' the authors write.

'While it is impossible to classify how many of these injuries are avoidable, these data can serve as a baseline to evaluate the outcomes of national and regional efforts to reduce law enforcement-related injury.'

The report comes on the heels of widespread debate about police violence.

Justin Feldman, a doctoral candidate at the Harvard School of Public Health, insists this figures should not just be leveled at police - but at medical professionals.

'While U.S. policymakers have decided that police departments should be one of the primary institutions tasked with addressing drug use, problem drinking, homelessness, sex work, and mental illness, these are all fundamentally public health issues requiring attention from public health researchers and professionals alike,' Feldman wrote in an article for the HPH Review.