The Lancet: Police killings of unarmed black Americans impact mental health of wider black American
PUBLIC RELEASE: 21-JUN-2018
THE LANCET
Study highlights population mental health impact of events widely perceived to be a symptom of structural racism.
Police killings of unarmed black Americans have adverse effects on the mental health of black American adults in the general population, according to a new population-based study. With police killings of unarmed black Americans widely perceived to be a symptom of structural racism, the findings highlight the role of structural racism as a driver of population health disparities, and support recent calls to treat police killings as a public health issue.
The study was led by the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and Boston University School of Public Health (USA), in collaboration with Harvard University, and is published in The Lancet.
Police kill more than 300 black Americans - at least a quarter of them unarmed - each year in the USA. Black Americans are nearly three times more likely than white Americans to be killed by police and nearly five times more likely to be killed by police while unarmed [1]. Beyond the immediate consequences for victims and their families, the population-level impact has so far been unclear.
More:
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-06/tl-tlp062018.php