Police Violence Against Native Americans Goes Far Beyond Standing Rock | FiveThirtyEight

"On Nov. 28, a legal collective representing Native Americans opposing the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline filed a lawsuit against two North Dakota counties and their sheriffs, and the city of Mandan, North Dakota, and its police chief. Eight days before, the suit alleges, law enforcement officers from those places had used excessive force against a group of peaceful protesters, injuring more than 200.



The allegations in the case are striking — the lawsuit describes officers using water cannons on protesters despite freezing temperatures, shooting people in the head with non-lethal plastic rounds, and shooting a woman in the genitals with a flash-bang grenade. But this single event is part of a bigger history — one in which Native Americans interact frequently with outside law enforcement and where those interactions are often deadly.



Native American tribes are sovereign nations, but 70 percent of them are under the legal authority of police and sheriff’s departments from nearby non-tribal communities.1 And as a report in In These Times noted in October, Native Americans are killed by police at disproportionately high rates — depending on the year, either Native Americans or African-Americans have the highest rate of deaths by law enforcement. For instance, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Native Americans were killed by police at a rate of 0.21 per 100,000 from 1999 to 2014, and African-Americans (who outnumber Native Americans roughly 10 to 1) were killed at a rate of 0.25 per 100,000.2

Even so, police killings of Native Americans are probably undercounted, said D. Brian Burghart, a journalist who runs the Fatal Encounters database, one of several independent projects aimed at producing a more complete tally of the number of Americans killed by police each year. Killings by police, as a whole, are undercounted by the CDC and other federal agencies. For instance, in 2014, the CDC logged 515 such deaths, while Fatal Encounters found more than 1,300.



And when police kill Native Americans, even the more accurate independent databases often miss or miscategorize those deaths, said Burghart and Samuel Sinyangwe, co-founder of the Mapping Police Violence database."



Police Violence Against Native Americans Goes Far Beyond Standing Rock | FiveThirtyEight