It includes emotional and sexual violence as well as verbal assault and psychological intimidation. But as others have noted, brutality goes beyond physical force. Access to these videos has led to unprecedented public discourse on what constitutes brutality, its connections to White supremacy, and the consequences for Black lives.Ĭertainly, excessive use of physical violence constitutes brutality. 1 With current technology, police killing of Black people is recorded for public scrutiny and consumption. Historical evidence of public harming of Black bodies by police dates back at least to the era of slavery, when police disciplined Blacks and recaptured those who escaped enslavement. However, in the absence of a standard definition or good data, the extent of police brutality remains difficult to quantify. Police brutality toward Blacks in the United States is not new. To reduce racial health inequities, public health scholars must rigorously explore the relationship between police brutality and health, and advocate policies that address racist oppression. We must ask whether our own research, teaching, and service are intentionally antiracist and challenge the institutions we work in to ask the same. Public health scholars should champion efforts to implement surveillance of police brutality and press funders to support research to understand the experiences of people faced with police brutality. We investigated links between police brutality and poor health outcomes among Blacks and identified five intersecting pathways: (1) fatal injuries that increase population-specific mortality rates (2) adverse physiological responses that increase morbidity (3) racist public reactions that cause stress (4) arrests, incarcerations, and legal, medical, and funeral bills that cause financial strain and (5) integrated oppressive structures that cause systematic disempowerment.
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