Injuries by Illinois police decrease as neighborhood incomes rise and racial diversity increases new report finds

An analysis of civilian injuries by police in Illinois found that residents of all races and ethnicities are more likely to sustain injuries if they live in economically disadvantaged areas, and they are less likely to be injured as the communities they live in become more racially diverse.

The study from the University of Illinois Chicago analyzed information on nearly 5,000 injuries by police that were treated in Illinois hospitals between 2016 and 2022. The researchers then compared that information to socioeconomic data from the U.S. Census on each injured person’s home ZIP code. The study is published in the Journal of Urban Health and was conducted as part of the School of Public Health’s Law Enforcement Epidemiology Project.

Most research on police-civilian interactions focuses on fatalities, the researchers explained.

“The problem is that for every fatal injury, there are more than 100 nonfatal injuries,” said author Lee Friedman, a research professor at UIC and co-lead of the Law Enforcement Epidemiology Project.

Analyzing nonfatal injuries allowed the researchers to get a more granular picture of what is happening across the state and evaluate how community-level characteristics are associated with injuries caused during police-civilian interactions. And it’s a critical trend to study because these injuries can not only harm people’s mental and physical health, but can erode community trust in police, the researchers said.

Without clear data on injuries, “there’s no information to support people in specific communities when they want to understand, ‘is this normal?’” said Alfreda Holloway-Beth, research assistant professor at UIC and co-lead on the Law Enforcement Epidemiology Project.

The study divided the state’s ZIP codes into three categories: Chicago, suburban Cook County and semi-urban and rural areas. Across all three areas, non-Hispanic Black residents had the highest rates of injuries, ranging from 5.5 to 10.5 times higher than the injury rate for non-Hispanic white residents. Hispanic-Latino residents had higher rates of injury compared to whites in Chicago and suburban Cook County, but lower rates in rural areas.

While injury rates for all residents increased in Chicago and suburban zip codes as the percentage of Black residents increased, the rate decreased in rural zip codes with more Black residents. Put another way, predominantly Black urban and suburban neighborhoods had higher rates of injury, but as predominately white rural areas became more diverse, residents of all races were less likely to be injured by police.

Statewide, as the percent of minority residents in a ZIP code increased, injury rates among non-Hispanic black, Hispanic/Latino and non-Hispanic white residents decreased, but there was variability across regions of the state and certain ZIP codes had very high rates of injury.

Across all three regions of Illinois and all three racial groups, the rate of injury increased along with the level of economic disadvantage. “It was very consistent that the more economically disadvantaged a community is, the higher the rates of injury are going to be,” Friedman said.

This result makes clear why it is very important to study injuries not just as an issue of race, Holloway-Beth said. “If we just rely on data on race, we don’t get at the issue of being poor in America and how much that affects these numbers,” she said.

Hollaway-Beth, who is also director of epidemiology at the Cook County Department of Public Health, is part of a national pilot project among state and local public health departments to start tracking this sort of injury data. The researchers hope that academics in other states start doing these sorts of analyses, too.

“I think the narrative has been a bit constrained as being solely about race and ethnicity. And it’s been primarily focused on fatal injuries,” Friedman said. “That has meant we’ve lost some of the complexity of the issue.”

The lead author on the paper is Dr. Chibuzor Abasilim, faculty at the University of Wisconsin, and Brett Shannon, a post-doctoral candidate, both are recent doctoral graduates of the UIC School of Public Health.