Police killings tied to worse mental health for African-Americans
(Reuters Health) – Police killings of unarmed black people are associated with worse mental health for African-Americans across the country, even when they have no direct connection to the deaths, a U.S. study suggests.
Each year in the U.S., police kill more than 300 black men and women – at least a quarter of them unarmed, researchers note in The Lancet. African-Americans are more than three times as likely as white people to be killed by police and more than five times as likely to be killed while unarmed.
Beyond the immediate impact for victims and families, however, research to date hasn’t provided a clear picture of the spillover effect these killings can have in the black community.
For the current study, researchers examined survey data from more than 103,000 black adults, collected between 2013 and 2015, to see how often they reported days on which their mental health was “not good” in the previous month. The study team also looked at data on police killings in participants’ home states in the past 90 days.
On average, participants reported 4.1 days of poor mental health. But researchers found that each additional police killing of an unarmed black person in the past 90 days before the survey was associated with 0.14 additional days of poor mental health among African-Americans who lived in the same state as the victim.
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“To people who may be suffering from poor mental health in the wake of police shootings, our study says you are not alone,” said lead study author Jacob Bor of the Boston University School of Public Health.
“There is an urgent need to reduce the incidence of police killings of unarmed black Americans,” Bor said by email. “But there is also a need to support the mental health of black people and communities when these events occur.”
African-Americans are exposed to an average of four police killings in their state each year, the study found. Extrapolating the results from the study to the entire population of 33 million African-American adults in the U.S., researchers estimated that police killings of unarmed black people could contribute to 55 million excess poor mental health days annually.
