Police killings scar black psyche
“#IfIDieInPoliceCustody Know that the color of my skin was the only crime committed,” a woman tweeted in 2015, three days after Sandra Bland was found dead in her Texas jail cell. “Nothing will happen to the Police in the Freddie Gray case ...” a man tweeted three days after the death of a 25-year-old Baltimore man whose fatal spinal injury while in police custody in 2015 triggered protests throughout the nation.
These sentiments — perception of a systemic unfairness and a loss of faith in institutions — are common among black people in the days and months following police killings of unarmed African-Americans, according to a study published in the medical journal the Lancet.
The report analyzed data collected between 2013 and 2016 from 103,710 black adults, finding the incidents to be detrimental to the psyche, adding 1.7 days of poor mental health annually per person. The study also analyzed whites’ self-reported mentality after all police killings — of white and black people— determining that “mental health impacts were not observed.”
Atheendar Venkataramani, a co-author of the study, told TheWashington Post that these findings did not mean white people had no emotional reaction to killings. But their responses, he said, haven’t “crossed the line from being upsetting to something that can create or cause disease.”
The paper said the decline in black mental health was seen in all black Americans, regardless of whether there was a relationship with the victim, and can manifest itself in a variety of ways, including “reactions of anger, activation of prior traumas and communal bereavement.”
“Structural racism experienced vicariously can be very consequential for (black) mental health,” said Venkataramani, a professor at theUniversity ofPennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine. “We are not telling people in the black American community something they do not already know.”
University of Texas at Austin professor Christen Smith told The Post in an email that society has “treated police violence like an acute crisis that only impacts those violated and/or killed and to some extent their immediate kin.” Includes: Free digital thermostat Free 5 Year Service Plan Free air duct treatment