Citation

Yazdiha H, Boen C. Currents (Ann Arbor) 2022; 2(1): 81-87.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2022, National Center for Institutional Diversity)

DOI

10.3998/ncidcurrents.1780

PMID

35647582

PMCID

PMC9133729

Abstract

Media, activists, and scholarly work have brought much needed attention to the devastating consequences of police violence and the uneven mortality risks from homicide by police. Black men face particularly high risks of police violence (Edwards, Esposito, & Hedwig, 2018; Edwards, Lee, & Esposito, 2019), with one in 1,000 Black men being killed by police over their life span (Edwards, Esposito, & Hedwig, 2018). Still, the trauma associated with police violence is not limited to those who experience it firsthand. With the rise of portable video recorders and social media, police violence that was only observed in situ is recorded and broadcast to a global audience, made viral, and viewed repeatedly, broadening the reach of these spillover effects. The video of George Floyd's death under a white police officer's knee, for example, has been viewed over 1.4 billion times. In addition to the direct consequences of this violence for victims, studies also document a host of collateral and spill-over effects of the carceral system and police violence, ranging from decreased trust in the police and increased legal cynicism (Kirk and Matsuda 2011; Sampson and Bartusch 1998), to decreased citizen crime reporting (Desmond, Papachristos, and Kirk 2016), to increased mental health risk (Bor et al. 2018; DeVylder et al. 2018; DeVylder, Fedina, and Link 2020; McLeod et al. 2020; Sewell, Jefferson, and Lee 2016). Given racial disparities in the risk of police violence and the sociohistorical context of racism in the United States, the collateral consequences of this violence are especially magnified for Black communities relative to other groups.

Despite increased attention to the spillover effects of racialized police violence, questions about how to capture the collateral consequences of police violence for population health and well-being remain unanswered. How can we identify and trace the embodied trauma that "touches the core of a being," the "stomachache filled with stress," that Mo Ivory describes so hauntingly after Michael Brown's killing? How can we measure the immediate and longer-lasting effects of hearing about the horrors of police violence--feelings that are experienced so differently by Black and white Americans? These are the questions we contend with in this research project...

Language: en

Keywords

law and society; police violence; racialized stress; social movements