A Survey of Academic Emergency Physicians
Excessive police violence is evident in the types of injury and trauma emergency care doctors are treating in the United States, indicates research published in Emergency Medicine Journal.
The findings are based on 315 responses to a representative survey of 393 academic emergency care doctors across the USA.
There are at least 800,000 police (law enforcement) officers in the USA. Figures for 2002 show that just short of the 45 million people who had a face-to-face encounter with one, did so at the behest of the police officer.
Almost all (99.8%) of emergency care providers who responded to the survey, believed that the police use excessive force to arrest and detain suspects.
A similar number of respondents (98%) confirmed that they had treated patients who they suspected had sustained injuries/bruising inflicted by police officers.
Around two thirds of respondents said that they had treated two or more such cases a year.
Doctors working in public facilities were more than four times as likely to report treating patients who had been the victims of excessive police force than doctors working at university or community teaching emergency care departments.
The most frequently cited type of injury was blunt trauma inflicted by fists or feet. About three out of four respondents cited overly tight handcuffs as causes of injury.
Seven out of 10 (71%) doctors said they had not reported these incidents and over 95% said they had no departmental policies on reporting their suspicions.
A high proportion of respondents (94%) said they had not been given any training on how to handle such cases. But around 70% felt they should be reporting incidents of this kind. Just under half felt that reporting should be a statutory requirement as it is for child abuse, domestic violence, and elder abuse.
The authors point out that the police do sometimes have to use coercive force, ranging across a spectrum from voice commands through physical restraint and use of chemical sprays, batons, and dogs, to lethal firearms.
Most police departments do not keep records of how often coercive force is used in confrontational situations, say the authors, but estimates suggest that this applies in around 8% of encounters.
How often coercive force escalates to excessive force is not known, the authors add, but the World Health Organization classifies injury and death caused by excessive force at the hands of police officers as a breach of human rights.