The rate of Hispanics killed by law enforcement officers jumped nearly 45% in the last decade, according to newly released data. It's been three years since George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police, resulting in a worldwide racial reckoning and protests against police brutality. There are few data on how police violence affects Latinos, Axios reports. Latinos killed by law enforcement hit .26 per 100,000 residents in 2020, up from .18 in 2011, found a study in the Journal of Community Health. Researchers examined mortality data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 2011 t0 2020.
New Mexico, the state with the largest percentage of Hispanic resident., had a rate of 1.02 per 100,000 residents —more than twice the rate of any other state. A surge of policing shootings in Albuquerque in 2014 led to a federal consent decree for the city's police. Colorado had the second-highest rate, with .49. Researchers found that Hispanics accounted for nearly 20% of all deaths in police custody between 2011 and 2020 and that their rate of fatal encounters was 1.33 times higher than the rate for non-Hispanic whites. Latino men between the ages of 20 to 39 and those living in Western U.S. states have seen the greatest spikes in deaths caused by police. More than 50,000 years of potential life among Hispanics were lost due to fatal police encounters across all ages, the study said. Researchers calculated this by subtracting the age of those killed from 80 (the assumed life expectancy) and then adding those figures for all of the people killed. During a decade, the Latino population grew by 18.3%, while the number killed by police grew by 61.4%.
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