NYC Vastly Underreported Cop-Related Deaths, Study Shows

NEW YORK CITY — The city reported less than half of police-involved deaths — excluding nearly a dozen deaths of unarmed people of color — over a recent five-year period, according to quietly released study.

The Health Department published the damning research just before midnight Tuesday, as New York City watched results roll in for the Democratic primary, and days after the New York Times published an op-ed revealing its existence.

"Our own system for recording these deaths — the same system applied by the federal government to all jurisdictions — is flawed," Health Commissioner Oxiris Barbot said in a statement. "The 'gold standard' must be questioned when it doesn't reflect reality."

Former Health Commissioner Dr. Mary Bassett's research — shelved for years before its release — identified a total of 105 police-related deaths between 2010 and 2015, more than double the 46 reported.

The report also found a disturbing trend when it came to the deaths of people of color.

While six unarmed Black people and five unarmed Hispanic people died during interactions with the NYPD, the number of unarmed white people killed by cops was zero, the study found.

Researchers feared the trend was caused by bias, writing, "This observed disparity might result from differences in the ways that [law enforcement] officers interact with persons of differences races, the neighborhood context in which an encounter occurs, or implicitly held ideas that might bias associations between race and perceived threat."

Researchers suggested death certificate classifications were to blame for the lower-than-accurate public tally of public deaths, noting one-third of the unreported deaths were not classified in the document as police-related.

The study was released a day after Mayor Bill de Blasio — facing mounting pressure to cut the NYPD's budget and increase transparency within the agency — promised to share the findings.

"I didn't honestly remember a very consistent effort there," de Blasio said in explanation of why it was not immediately published. "Whatever it is, we'll release it, and we'll release it quickly."

Despite de Blasio's promises to release more police body-cam footage and disciplinary data, increasing NYPD transparency may prove to be a tough nut to crack for a mayor facing mounting pushback from New Yorkers, City Council and NYPD top brass.

NYPD Captains Endowment Union president Chris Monahan recently called on de Blasio to end CompStat — the NYPD's public crime statistic database — and Commissioner Dermot Shea recently refused to answer questions coming from Attorney General Letitia James during her hearing on policing during New York City's George Floyd protests.

When James quizzed Shea about a photograph of an NYPD officer flashing what appeared to be a white power sign, the commissioner refused to testify, saying simply, "You don't have the whole story on that."