Violent Encounters With Police Send Thousands of People to the ER Every Year

[Nevilledog]

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Maurice Chammah
@MauriceChammah
"Many of the country’s roughly 18,000 law enforcement agencies don’t tally or make public the number of people who need medical care after officers break their arms, bruise their faces or shock them with Tasers."

Violent Encounters With Police Send Thousands of People to the ER Every Year
That's probably an undercount. But data from San Jose offers a glimpse of what the national scale of police violence might be.
themarshallproject.org
9:56 AM · Jun 23, 2021

https://www.themarshallproject.org/2021/06/23/violent-encounters-with-police-send-thousands-of-people-to-the-er-every-year

SAN JOSE, California — Eliel Paulino was less than a block from his apartment complex late one night in 2015 when red police lights flashed in his SUV’s rearview mirror. After he pulled into his parking lot, police told him the light on his license plate was out.

Within minutes, a routine traffic stop became a beatdown, court records show. An officer yelled at Paulino to stop talking, then pulled him to the ground. A second policeman jabbed his baton into Paulino’s gut; a third struck him more than a dozen times with a baton. An emergency room doctor needed four staples to close the wounds in Paulino’s battered right arm.

In police reports, officers claimed that Paulino fought and resisted arrest; video from a security camera showed he did not. The city paid Paulino $700,000 after a jury found the beating violated his constitutional rights.

“The San Jose Police Department has a problem using excessive force,” the jury forewoman, Jessica Erickson, said in an interview. “It needs to stop.”

*snip*

[Karma13612]

1. And these stats on physical injury due to

Law enforcement force is all trackable.

I used to be a medical coder until I retired a couple years ago.

In the coding system which is used nation-wide (ICD-10), you can list not only the injuries. But, you can also code the cause of the injury (burns, electrocution, slipping on ice, lacerations due to knives, etc). Included in the coding is the ability to report that the injury occurred as a result of the law enforcement encounter.

I would imagine it’s the same as with gun stats though. Nobody wants the stats collected/reported because it will make guns and LE look bad.