Neighborhood Police Encounters, Health, And Violence In A Southern City

Abstract

The disproportionate rates of police surveillance and encounters in many communities in the US may be contributing to inequities in health and violence. Frequent policing in communities, which may often also be aggressive policing, has been associated with diminished health and well-being. This study adds to the growing body of research on this issue by examining the relationships between neighborhood police stop-and-frisk encounters and both health outcomes and violence rates in New Orleans, Louisiana, in an ecological, cross-sectional study using local police report, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and census data. The average rate of police stop-and-frisk encounters was more than three times higher for Black adults compared with their White counterparts. Even after we accounted for concentrated disadvantage (a high percentage of residents of lower socioeconomic status) and residential racial and income segregation, neighborhoods with higher rates of encounters had significantly higher prevalence rates of smoking, physical inactivity, and poor physical health, and they experienced significantly more violent crime (18.35 more per 1,000) and domestic violence (49.91 more per 1,000) events than neighborhoods with lower levels of police encounters. There is a need for strengthened policy focused on the relationship between frequent policing and health and violence outcomes.

Racism as the fundamental cause of ethnic inequities in COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy: A theoretical framework and empirical exploration using the UK Household Longitudinal Study

“…The limited availability of data existent to test our theoretical model meant that in our empirical model we were restricted by measures capturing constructs that directly result from, but are operationally different from, structural racism. Recent studies in the US have empirically documented the association between structural racism and health inequities using individual exposure measures like police encounters (Theall et al, 2022) and racialised disenfranchisement (Homan & Brown, 2022), or multidimensional measures of structural racism developed using latent variable models (Chantarat et al, 2021). Although we didn't have access to similar constructs, measures we had available at the institutional-level such as inequities in socioeconomic position, area-level deprivation, and household overcrowding, are clear outcomes of structural and institutional racism.…”

The spillover effects of classmates’ police intrusion on adolescents’ school-based defiant behaviors: The mediating role of institutional trust.

“…Studies have found that the adverse effects of police experiences can spillover onto the adjustment of people as an aggregate among adult-aged samples. For instance, neighborhood-level police stops have predicted elevated psychological distress (Sewell et al, 2016) and diminished health among neighborhood adult-aged residents (Sewell et al, 2021; Sewell & Jefferson, 2016; Theall et al, 2022). Similarly, police-perpetrated killings have deleterious repercussions for Black adults’ mental health (Bor et al, 2018; Curtis et al, 2021).…”

Officer-Involved Killings of Unarmed Black People and Racial Disparities in Sleep Health

“…Both direct and vicarious exposure to police use of deadly force have been linked to poor health outcomes, most notably poor mental health . Even exposure to nonlethal police encounters have been linked to poor health outcomes . Sleep health may be adversely affected through several of the mechanisms identified in this literature.…”

“…[23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35] Even exposure to nonlethal police encounters have been linked to poor health outcomes. [36][37][38] Sleep health may be adversely affected through several of the mechanisms identified in this literature. Officer-involved killings may diminish expectations about future well-being and longevity, induce hypervigilance, and increase stress including posttraumatic stress disorder, many of which have been associated with poor sleep.…”