On Wednesday night, more than 100 protesters flooded into the Baltimore streets following the news that a jury had failed to convict William Porter, the first of six police officers to be tried for the death of Freddie Gray.

Gray died in April after he suffered a severe spinal injury in the back of a police van. The incident set off a wave of protests and riots around the country as members of the Black Lives Matter movement took to the streets to demand accountability for the growing number of black men killed by police each year.

It is a problem that is felt in communities across America—but there’s still no system for tracking exactly how much of a problem it has been become. The actual number of people killed during encounters with law enforcement is extremely difficult to determine.

That’s why researchers are now pushing policy makers to approach the issue from a new perspective: In a report published in PLOS Medicine in December, Dr. Nancy Krieger and her team at the Harvard’s school of Public Health propose that deaths caused during altercations with law enforcement should be tracked alongside infectious diseases.

In the paper, the researchers argue that officer unions and police departments have long-resisted the release of data and that a medical approach could help overstep obstacles.

“It is time to bring a public health perspective to this problem from a standpoint that emphasizes prevention and health equity,” Dr. Krieger wrote on Reddit during an Ask Me Anything (AMA) session. “These deaths, like other violent deaths, are not a matter for criminal justice only. Their health impact includes and extends beyond those killed and their families to the broader communities in which these deaths occur and society overall.”

In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention operate a surveillance system that tracks so-called “notifiable conditions”—ranging from Ebola to food poisoning—and publishes the results in a weekly run-down.

Public health departments at local levels are mandated to report cases of these pre-determined conditions so the researchers argue that all it would take would be adding law enforcement intervention deaths—including both civilians and police officers—to the list:

“No act of Congress is needed. No police department need be involved. Public health agencies can do the job.”

Responding to questions from Reddit users about the proposal, Dr. Krieger explained why a new approach is necessary:

“Public health is only one of the many fields and sectors of government who need to be involved in the work required to reduce risk of death due to legal intervention and to promote equity, including health equity, so that all may truly thrive. That said, public health does have a unique role with regard to monitoring the extent to which adverse or beneficial health risks exist within and across communities. “The first step here is have public health step up and play an active role in real-time monitoring the count and rates of deaths due to legal intervention, so that communities can, in real-time, have public official data on these counts and rates.”

Both in the report and the AMA, Dr. Krieger cited “The Counted,” a database run by The Guardian, which relies on crowdsourced information to fill the holes in data on police killings. So far it shows 1,091 people have died, and Krieger says helps shed light on the localities that are most at-risk.

Redditors also asked about whether socioeconomic status and race play a role in the risk of death from legal intervention and how the CDC’s tracking system would help identify those factors:

“The summary data currently provided in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report only total counts of cases (for diseases) and, for deaths, stratify these data solely by age at death,” Krieger responded. “However, death certificates do provide data on race/ethnicity and (since 1989) educational level of the decedent. Additionally, the death certificate provides residential address of the decedent, allowing for geocoding and linkage to area-based socioeconomic data, such as census tract poverty level. Possibilities accordingly exist for reporting the data on death due to legal intervention in relation to both race/ethnicity and socioeconomic position.”

She added that, based on previous analysis of long-term trends going back to the 1960s, income had a big affect on how many white men were killed by police but little on black men. “These results suggest that race relations, above and beyond socioeconomic conditions, play an important role in driving these rates of death,” she explained.

Still, the data available is lacking and often underreported. Dr. Krieger’s proposal offers a novel approach to ensuring better information is available about legal intervention deaths—and Krieger thinks that information could help bring about social change. She highlights how data collection played a role in the past.

“These changes were brought about by social protest, fueled by evidence,” she writes. “Evidence is of course not sufficient, but it is essential. Underscoring this point is how the suppression of evidence is a time-honored approach to maintaining power and inequality, by suppressing evidence of the harms caused by injustice.”