How Data Analysis Reconsiders Deaths During Arrest

Violence committed by police officers in the United States is paradoxically highly documented and incompletely documented. We frequently encounter this situation in our work—some victims’ stories are told by many sources, while other victims’ stories are rarely if ever told. This is the gap statistics can fill. 

In 2015, the US Bureau of Justice Statistics concluded that two federal efforts to document deaths that occur during arrest were woefully incomplete. Their analysis relied on the same statistical methods HRDAG’s team has been using internationally for decades, so we examined their approach, considering various assumptions required by the method. This work resulted in an essay in Granta magazine, “Violence in Blue,” written by our director of research Patrick Ball, which concluded that approximately one-third of all Americans killed by strangers are killed by police. Following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers on May 25, 2020, Patrick refreshed the article with a new introduction, writing, “This cannot be acceptable in democracy.”

Related publications

Granta. Patrick Ball. 8 June, 2020.
Violence in Blue

HRDAG. Kristian Lum and Patrick Ball. 2 April, 2015.
Estimating Undocumented Homicides with Two Lists and List Dependence. 

HRDAG. Kristian Lum and Patrick Ball. 2 April, 2015.
How many police homicides in the US? A reconsideration. 

HRDAG, March 2015. Kristian Lum and Patrick Ball. 4 March, 2015.
BJS Report on Arrest-Related Deaths: True Number Likely Much Greater.

Podcasts + Videos

Plutopia News Network, 2025.
Patrick Ball. Data and Human Rights.

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, and Open Society Foundations.

Image: photo by Flickr user John Liu, CC-BY-2.0, modified by David Peters.

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