Mentor Visit Assessment #7

Mentor: ​Dr. Jessica Dwyer

Profession: ​Medical Examiner

Location: ​Southwestern Institute of Forensic Science

Date: ​2/20/19

Time: ​11:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.

Assessment:

The goal for this mentor visit was to wrap up any loose ends with our data collection,

including rounding out the rest of the 2018 cases that were just recently wrapped up.

Additionally, I hoped to start finalizing all the statistics so that I could begin to analyze complete

patterns. Overall, the visit was very successful, and I was able to make many large steps toward

completing a large portion of my product.

After running the basic statistics on the years we had not previously compiled, I noticed

certain patterns. The general trend in the overall data seems to be that a rise in police-involved

deaths occurred from 2011 to 2012, and continued to rise, peaking in 2015, then falling the next

year, before rising for 2017 and 2018. Looking at these numbers initially, it seems that they

follow a pattern of increased media attention on police-involved deaths, specifically police

shootings. The uptick around 2012 can be partially attributed to the 2012 shooting of Trayvon

Martin, which sparked widespread attention and led to the official formation of the Black Lives

Matter movement. This movement and the protests surrounding police-involved shootings really

peaked in 2015, which is reflected in the data. In 2016, police-involved deaths went down pretty
significantly, only to rise again in 2017 and 2018, which could possibly be attributed to increased

tensions due to the current political climate, among other factors.

Even comparing 2011 and 2012 presents two starkly different stories. 2011 had only 11

homicides out of 26 total police-involved deaths. That means less than 50% (about 42%) of these

deaths were ruled homicides, compared to 21 homicides out of 35 police-involved deaths. This

means about 60% of police-involved deaths in 2012 were homicides. In fact, along with the

general trend of rising police-involved deaths, the percentages of homicides in these deaths also

has a general rising pattern before peaking at 2015, which had homicides account for 77.8% of

its police-involved deaths. These again follow the trend set out by the overall numbers, but the

2017 and 2018 percentages of homicides also fall under 50% (at 41.9% and 47.4% respectively).

This means that, while these years had an uptick in overall police-involved deaths, the amount of

those deaths that were homicides actually went down, which is an odd and unexpected pattern. In

both of these years, the amount of individuals that died in police-involved accidents has risen

from 3 in 2016 to 10 in both 2017 and 2018. This could mean that standards for flagging

something as police-involved had changed, but, from reading through the cases, I do not believe

that is what has happened here. I am not entirely sure what can explain this odd trend, but many

police-involved deaths ruled as accidents involve drugs, or car chases gone wrong.

One point of data that remained consistent throughout the years, though, is the incredibly

large amount of cases where decedents had drugs in their system. In every year, this number was

far over 50% of the total deaths in that year, and spanned all manners of death represented. This

speaks to an incredibly large problem faced throughout the country that has continued to persist.