A new study has concluded that people with mental disabilities in Israel are at greater risk of being killed during encounters with law enforcement, and are more likely to become subject to police violence than the general population.
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The study examined media reports in 2019-2020 and found that in four of five cases that ended in a civilian death as a result of a confrontation with the police, the victim was either mentally challenged or a member of a minority group.
In Israel, similar to most countries across the globe, according to the study, information isn't provided to the public when an encounter between police and civilians results in a death. Consequently, journalists and human rights groups around the world take great pains to document and report such incidents when they occur. The existing data points to significant gaps between countries in this regard.
Additionally, the ratio of people killed by police in the US per 10 million people is 28; in Canada it is 9.7; in Norway it is 1.9; in Japan it is 0.2.
Encounters between police officers and people with mental disabilities have recently become more common. And although there are significant differences in terms of the degrees of violence recorded in various countries, an in-depth survey of over 300,000 incidents in different countries found that one in every four people with mental disabilities has been arrested.
The research was conducted by Dr. Daniel Weishut of Hadassah Academic College, Dr. Zvi Benninga of Hebrew University, Dr. Lucy Aitchison of Tel Aviv University and Dr. Bettina Steiner-Birmanns of Shaare Zedek Medical Center.
In their conclusion, the authors wrote that "interactions between disabled individuals and the police are more common and dangerous than for those who are abled, and the true scope of the problem is unknown. Part of the reason this population is at risk, particularly in Israel, can be explained through theories of intersectionality, whereby multiple social categories work together as compounding risk factors."
The researchers recommended that authorities and medical professionals "use intersectional approaches to make sense of the multiple layers of misunderstanding that lead to violence, and hopefully to design policies and training that address these issues."
"We conclude with a call on national institutes to be transparent in their reporting of cases of police violence, and on health professionals to be aware of the vulnerability of people with disabilities and document any incidents of police violence in medical files," they wrote.
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