By Mina Kim, PhD; Phillip Atiba Solomon, PhD; Justin M. Feldman, ScD

Introduction In the US, injuries caused by law enforcement are a public health concern and driver of racial health inequities.1-4 While fatalities have attracted considerable public attention, nonfatal injuries inflicted by police are far more prevalent. Analyzing nonfatal injury trends can therefore help to answer critical questions about how populations experience policing, including whether the major advocacy efforts related to racial inequity in policing occurring from 2014 to 20215 coincided with changes to rates of legal intervention injury overall or by racial and ethnic group. Methods This repeated cross-sectional study analyzed publicly accessible, deidentified data from the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System—All Injuries Program (NEISS-AIP), a nationally representative sample of US hospital emergency departments (EDs), for the period 2004 to 2021. Local ethics review and informed consent were not required in accordance with the Common Rule. This study followed the Strengthening the Reporting of Observational Studies in Epidemiology (STROBE) reporting guideline for cross-sectional studies. In NEISS-AIP, legal intervention includes an injury or poisoning caused by on-duty police or other legal authorities, including private security guards. NEISS-AIP offers an advantage over administrative claims data, which underreport substantial shares of legal intervention injuries.6 We used NEISS-AIP’s predefined race and ethnicity categories, which were derived from patient medical records (eAppendix in Supplement 1). All analyses were performed between September 2024 and July 2025 using R software version 4.2 (R Project for Statistical Computing) with the survey and mgcv packages. We fit quasi-Poisson models for injury rates, treating year as a spline (for visualization) or as linear (to assess trends quantitatively), using parametric bootstrapping to construct CIs. We deemed any 95% CI for the linearized trend line that included the null value to be inconclusive as to its directionality, but we still interpreted the confidence limit as the bounds within which the trend was expect to fall. Additional methodological details are available in the eAppendix in Supplement 1.Results Between 2004 and 2021, a total of 1 500 577 ED visits (95% CI, 1 073 632-1 927 522; 85% [95% CI, 60% to 100%] men; mean [SD] age, 33 [12] years) in the US were for legal intervention injuries. Among patients with race and ethnicity data, 42.3% (95% CI, 21.2% to 63.4%) were African American or Black, 13.9% (95% CI, 5.4% to 22.3%) were Hispanic or Latinx, and 41.1% (95% CI, 30.7% to 51.5%) were White. Most patients were treated and released, with only 4.3% (95% CI, 2.5% to 6.1%) requiring hospitalization (Table). Legal intervention injury rates for the US population as a whole remained relatively stable over the study period (Figure), with the 2021 rate at 92% (95% CI, 71% to 119%) the level of the 2004 rate. Over the study period, mean injury rates for African American or Black people were 5.3 (95% CI,4.6 to 6.2) times those of White people. Rates for Hispanic or Latinx people were 1.5 (95% CI, 1.2 to 1.7) times those of White people. While the point estimates for Black:White RR decreased by 6%, from 5.48 in 2004 to 5.13 in 2021, uncertainty was high, with the 95% CI ranging from a 42% reduction to 51% increase. For the Latinx population, the RR decreased from 1.94 in 2004 to 1.06 in 2021, corresponding to a 45% (95% CI, 12% to 66%) decrease.

JAMA Netw Open. 2025

By Spencer Piston,1 Kaneesha R. Johnson,2 Selma Hedlund,3 and Chas Walker

We begin this article by discussing two moments, in the late 1800s and late 1900s, in which the racist views of influential political scientists fundamentally shaped research on policing. In contrast, today’s scholarship, breaking sharply with research of the past, does not attempt to justify racist policing but to study it. The dominant approach today follows a racial disparities framework, which maps out the uneven allocation of police harms. As we discuss, these studies have made valuable contributions to the field and to real-world efforts to resist the damage done by police. At the same time, however, the racial disparities framework has limitations that make it difficult for scholars to understand racist police oppression. We conclude by arguing that, to take the next step forward, future scholarship should follow the lead of and expand upon work that centers the voices of the highly policed.

Annu. Rev. Political Sci. 2025. 28:499–519

Edited by Wornie Reed

Despite the national attention police violence gained and the calls for police reform following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, police officers are killing more people each year.1 Police killed at least 1,173 people in 2024.2 Although half of the people shot and killed by police are white, black Americans are shot at a disproportionate rate. Hispanic people are also killed at a disproportionate rate. One reason this assault on citizens continues is that very few roadblocks have been put in the way of excessive violent policing. While any policing reform is beneficial, many reforms being discussed and enacted are unlikely to significantly reduce police use of excessive force. Many critical issues in policing affect African American people. This book addresses several of them. The Black Lives Matter protests in the United States and around the world were primarily about the excessive use of force by police against African American people. This excessive use of force includes homicides. In the U.S., police kill black people at more than twice the rate they kill white people, and black people are 30 percent more likely than white people to be unarmed when killed.3 Of all the police killings documented between 2013 and 2019, one data source, Mapping Police Violence, found only 1 percent of cases led to a conviction of a police officer.4 Many members of the public andsome elected officials have argued that the excessive use of force by the police could be curtailed if more officers were held accountable for their actions, primarily their actions against innocent citizens. The authors of the papers in this series subscribe to that view and discuss some significant reasons why and how police are not held accountable for their excessive use of force. 

Blacksburg, VA, Virginia Tech Publishing, 2025. 98p.

By Guyora Binder,and Ekow Yankah

The widely applauded conviction of officer Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd employed the widely criticized felony murder rule. Should we use felony murder as a tool to check discriminatory and violent policing? The authors object that felony murder—although perhaps the only murder charge available for this killing under Minnesota law—understated Chauvin’s culpability and thereby inadequately denounced his crime. They show that further opportunities to prosecute police for felony murder are quite limited. Further, a substantial minority of states impose felony murder liability for any death proximately caused by a felony, even if the actual killer was a police officer, not an “agent” of the felony. In these “proximate cause” jurisdictions, felony murder is far more often used to prosecute the (often Black) targets of police violence, than to prosecute culpable police.

Previous scholarship on prosecution of felons for killings by police criticized such proximate cause rules as departures from the “agency” rules required by precedent. But today’s proximate cause felony murder rules were enacted legislatively during the War on Crime and are thus immune to this traditional argument. The authors instead offer a racial justice critique of proximate cause felony murder rules as discriminatory in effect, and as unjustly shifting blame for reckless policing onto its victims. Noting racially disparate patterns of charging felony murder, and particularly in cases where police have killed, the authors call on legislatures to reimpose “agency” limits on felony murder as a prophylactic against discrimination. Finally, the authors widen this racial justice critique to encompass felony murder as a whole, urging legislatures to abolish felony murder wherever racially disparate patterns of charging can be demonstrated.

17 Harv. L. & Pol'y Rev. 157 (2022).

By Anne Le Huérou

In April 2009, a police officer, D. Yevsyukov opened fire at people in a Moscow supermarket, killing two and wounding several others. In March 2012, a young man died in custody after being raped with a champagne bottle in a police station of the city of Kazan. Soon after, the police reform, passed in March 2011, was considered as a “failure” by the newly appointed Minister of Internal Affairs Vladimir Kolokoltsev. Those two cases of police violence, far from being exceptional, are almost a part of the routine – though not always with such deadly endings - in many police precincts in Russia and comprise a growing amount of the convictions against Russia at the ECHR. These two particular episodes can serve as landmarks for what I would like to develop in this contribution, for the first played a starting point for building-up police violence and deviance issues as a public matter that further helped and pushed the State to undertake a reform, under the presidency of D Medvedev, and the second led to a kind of acknowledgement that the task was too huge, at the very moment when the coming back of V Putin as the President was sending down the issue from the political agenda. In between, very diverse, vivid and sometimes at first glance paradoxical mobilizations against police violence, corruption and misbehavior have spread all over the country. Would they be NGOs helping victims of police violence to seek justice through court, provocative performances from art-groups or people taking arms against the police, these mobilizations

Paris: University of Paris, 2016. 20p.