The agencies that maintain police statistics often fail to include "Hispanic" as an ethnic category, according to a 2016 report by the Urban Institute. Plus, they leave these determinations of ethnicity to individual police officers. I want to highlight an authoritative report cited herein conducted by LatinosUS titled, "Special Advance Fact Sheet: Deaths of People of Color By Law Enforcement Are Severely Under-Counted."
While not resolving the matter entirely, the report addresses the undercounts of Latinos and other people of color killed while in police custody. Given high rates of intermarriage, Spanish surname is a poor proxy since many "Hispanics" have Anglo surnames and no standard reporting metric or process across locales is in place.
As addressed in prior blog posts, if we zoom out and widen the lens to include lives lost in the context of governmental policy surrounding immigration and border crossings, the number of Latina/o/x deaths grows astronomically.
The Real Death Valley: The Untold Story of Mass Graves and Migrant Deaths in South Texas
Death in the desert: Migrants face harsh conditions in West Texas by Dudley Althaus June 26, 2021
All of this makes me shudder, as well as deeply concerned about the regular violence committed against poor and desperate people—poised to contribute positively and enormously to our country—that gets justified as "keeping our borders safe."
The point here is that these aren't idiosyncratic events but reflect patterned violence against our communities instead. Latinas/os must therefore commit to not solely addressing state and local police enforcement policies, but federal immigration ones, as well. Doing so stands to benefit all groups entering our country from other places besides Mexico like Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Venezuela, Haiti, Brazil, and so on.
Clearly, the African American community has done a much better job than the Latino community in stepping up to the plate on police violence against their own community. Awareness is a good first step. Working in solidarity on such matters with the African American, Asian American, and Native American communities is essential, as well. Beginning with standard reporting processes, substantive policy remedies must follow.
I thank Dr. Roberto Cintli Rodriguez, himself a victim of police brutality, for bringing the LatinosUS report to my attention, and for sharing the La Raza Killings data base with much more information and resources on killings of people in our communities.
@Larazakillings
Latinos are disproportionately killed by police but often left out of the debate about brutality, some advocates say
“I don’t wish this for any mother, for any human being, to go through that. Something has got to be done so it doesn’t happen as often as it’s happening,” the Los Angeles woman said.
She doesn’t believe that her son, if he had been White, would have died Dec. 15 when sheriff’s deputies were called to a Riverside County grocery store for a disturbance.
Serrano, a 33-year-old Mexican American, was at a Stater Bros. market picking up snacks that night when the sheriff’s office received a report about a man — later identified as Serrano — wandering in and out of the store. Another 911 call reported him tussling with a security guard. Video from a bystander shows sheriff’s deputies beating Serrano with batons and using a Taser on him before wrestling him facedown onto a checkout counter.
Serrano is heard pleading “Let me go, please” several times in a body camera video, at one point saying “I can’t breathe” and “You’re using excessive force” in between cries of pain. Several minutes later, an officer notices that the man is not breathing. The officers place him on the floor and try to resuscitate him. He is pronounced dead at a hospital.
According to Sheriff Chad Bianco, the preliminary autopsy report suggests that Serrano died of a methamphetamine overdose; attorneys for the family, which has filed a wrongful-death lawsuit, say he died of asphyxiation.
Serrano’s death did not get much attention beyond the local news, but a review of databases that track police killings shows that while their cases have largely gone untold in the national discussion of police violence, Latinos are killed by police at nearly double the rate of White Americans. And while the national debate on police killings has focused on Black Americans, whose deaths at the hands of law enforcement have been high-profile and outnumber those of other people of color, some activists say the situation for the Latino community has become critical.
“It’s a crisis, in the same manner as it’s a crisis in the Black community. . . . Chances are, if anybody is going to be getting killed, they’re going to be Black or Brown,” said Roberto Rodriguez, an associate professor at the University of Arizona who researches police brutality and was a victim himself in the late 1970s.
