Racially Motivated Police Brutality Is a Community Public Health Issue in the United States

Abstract

Ongoing global protests against police violence and racism were heightened in 2020 after the deaths of Breana Taylor and George Floyd, whose deaths made headlines worldwide and raised awareness of the Black Lives Matter movement, which targets structural racism and violence against Black people in the USA and abroad. There are many documented links between policing and health-related outcomes, including but not limited to fatal injuries that increase population-specific mortality rates, adverse physiological responses that increase morbidity, psychological stress, arrests, incarcerations, and legal, medical, and funeral bills that cause socioeconomic deprivation, poor school performance, incomplete high-school education and not entering higher education, and the intersecting oppressive structures that result in systematic disempowerment and the destruction of civil liberties. This paper makes the case for classifying and exploring police brutality as a public health issue.