Of course, seeing a loved one or member of any race injured or killed unexpectedly due to any cause is horrific. And although Black people are killed by the police at a rate disproportionate to their population size, about half of the people shot and killed by police are white, according to the Washington Post police shootings database.
But there are particular dimensions to the pain of seeing a Black individual brutalized or killed by a police officer that are not immediately apparent to most non-Black people, beginning with the historical weight these incidents bear and the collective trauma they evoke.
A Black person being injured or killed at the hands of the police in is a devastating reminder of that disturbing period in American history. Police killings of Black people also represent the continued oppression and devaluation of Black lives at a systemic level.
Evidence demonstrates that police killings of Black people indeed have effects that extend far beyond the Black families or social circles that know the individual who died into Black communities across the country. A study published in the Lancet in used two sets of data—police killings of unarmed Black Americans and the self-reported mental health of Black Americans in the state where the person was killed—to see if they could establish a causal link.
Of the , respondents, 38, of them had had at least one police killing of an unarmed Black person in their state in the last three months.
Researchers found that for each additional police killing of an unarmed Black person, Black respondents living in that state reported an additional 0. No such correlations were found among white respondents or for killings of armed Black Americans.
Police brutality impacts mental health above and beyond the actual incidents of it, though. The interminable uncertainty of the looming threat of police brutality can take severe psychological tolls on the people who are most vulnerable to it—i.
This kind of stress and anticipation "is not visible to other people. As Dr. Black individuals, and especially Black men, bring this fear and stress into every interaction with police of which Black people have many more, due to policies and practices that support racial profiling , Alang says—including what should be peaceful encounters, like when they get stopped on the street or pulled over for a traffic violation.
Benjamin says. The police officer approaches you differently than others, approaches you as if you're a threat or you're not worth dignity and respect. Even stops that are not physically violent harm mental health. The APHA policy statement cites a number of studies showing a connection between stops that people perceive as discriminatory, unfair, or intrusive and symptoms of psychological distress, including anxiety, depression , and PTSD.
Beyond that, survey data suggests Black individuals are more likely to report stress resulting from police encounters than white individuals—especially troubling, the APHA statement authors write, given that stress due to perceived racial discrimination is generally associated with chronic disease risk factors and early death in Black people. Evidence shows that the constant stress of the looming threat, the actual experience, and the devastating aftermath of police brutality in all of its forms physical, emotional, verbal at a personal first- or secondhand and societal level can have tremendous effects on the mental and physical health of people.
Which mental disorders show the highest correlation with deadly use of force? What forms of training help most to reduce implicit bias and improve the situation? Ongoing research on these and other topics is the cornerstone of moving forward and improving the situation when it comes to the excessive use of force by police officers and the disproportionate impact that it has on racial minorities.
What about defunding police departments? This is a tactic that has been brought up as a solution to police brutality.
Defunding the police means taking money away from funding the police department and instead sending those funds to invest in the communities that are struggling the most and where most of the policing occurs. It's very much similar to the concept of directing money toward prevention instead of dealing with problems after the fact. While not a simple solution, there is merit in funding programs and communities that are struggling instead of putting more people behind bars.
Understanding the psychology behind police brutality is the first step toward fixing the problem. Unfortunately, the situation is inherently one that needs to be fixed from the top down, beginning with the systems of government and how they allocate their funding. When better training and education is in place for police officers, as well as better mental health supports, then better outcomes may result.
It's also worth noting that while this problem seems to be most prominent in the United States, other countries may have their own racial tensions for example, in Canada and Australia there is tension between government and Indigenous people. The United States, however, struggles more than most with the use of deadly force in the form of gun violence. For this reason, the psychology of police brutality is only one piece of the puzzle. The other piece will be understanding the problem of gun violence in the United States, and how it compares to rates of gun violence in other countries.
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Police shot him in the groin with a rubber bullet , possibly preventing him from having children. That idea was exemplified this month in Buffalo when two officers were suspended after video showed them shoving a year-old peace activist to the ground. More than 50 officers, the entire emergency response team, resigned from that unit after the suspension, apparently in support of the two colleagues.
In the wake of protests, a handful of US mayors have pledged to reallocate some funds from police, and many more have, once again, promised to improve policies. But given the failure of many past reforms, a coalition of activists actively opposes such moderate policy shifts and argues the US needs more radical change, pointing at the failures of past reforms.
These activists say that it would not only be a waste of the momentum of these global protests, but that continuing to rely on police departments to address their own violence will simply lead to ongoing harm. They point at the continued power and influence of police unions and legal protections for police officers accused of wrongdoing and excessive force as barriers to change.
Grieving and frustrated: Black scientists call out racism in the wake of police killings. In New York City, the police purview goes as far as to include enforcement of street-vendor licences. Curtailing police encounters could also result in fewer crimes. Research published last year found that Black and Latino boys who are stopped more often by police are more likely to commit crimes months later Edwards, F.
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Del Toro, J. Download references. News Feature 10 NOV
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