Racial/Ethnic Inequalities for Legal Intervention Injuries Treated in U.S. Emergency Departments: United States (2004-2021)

Nonfatal injuries caused by law enforcement are a widespread yet underexamined public health concern in the United States, with significant implications for racial health equity. Using data from the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System—All Injury Program (NEISS-AIP) from 2004 to 2021, this study estimated national trends in emergency department visits for injuries inflicted by on-duty police and assessed disparities across racial and ethnic groups. The analysis incorporated imputation for missing data on race and parametric bootstrapping to account for sampling and imputation uncertainty. We found that legal intervention injury rates remained relatively stable over time, with Black individuals consistently experiencing rates over five times higher than White individuals, and Latinx individuals showing moderately higher rates than Whites with some evidence of decline. These findings suggest that, despite heightened public scrutiny and advocacy following nationwide protests against racialized policing, rates of nonfatal injuries from law enforcement have remained high and unequally distributed by race.