Police kill more than 300 black Americans—at least a quarter of them unarmed—each year in the USA. These events might have spillover effects on the mental health of people not directly affected.
Methods
In this population-based, quasi-experimental study, we combined novel data on police killings with individual-level data from the nationally representative 2013–15 US Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) to estimate the causal impact of police killings of unarmed black Americans on self-reported mental health of other black American adults in the US general population. The primary exposure was the number of police killings of unarmed black Americans occurring in the 3 months prior to the BRFSS interview within the same state. The primary outcome was the number of days in the previous month in which the respondent's mental health was reported as “not good”. We estimated difference-in-differences regression models—adjusting for state-month, month-year, and interview-day fixed effects, as well as age, sex, and educational attainment. We additionally assessed the timing of effects, the specificity of the effects to black Americans, and the robustness of our findings.
Findings
38 993 (weighted sample share 49%) of 103 710 black American respondents were exposed to one or more police killings of unarmed black Americans in their state of residence in the 3 months prior to the survey. Each additional police killing of an unarmed black American was associated with 0·14 additional poor mental health days (95% CI 0·07–0·22; p=0·00047) among black American respondents. The largest effects on mental health occurred in the 1–2 months after exposure, with no significant effects estimated for respondents interviewed before police killings (falsification test). Mental health impacts were not observed among white respondents and resulted only from police killings of unarmed black Americans (not unarmed white Americans or armed black Americans).
Interpretation
Police killings of unarmed black Americans have adverse effects on mental health among black American adults in the general population. Programmes should be implemented to decrease the frequency of police killings and to mitigate adverse mental health effects within communities when such killings do occur.
Last edited by Old Man Whirly! on Jun 1st, 2020 at 09:48 AM
Your Lord knows very well what is in your heart. Your soul suffices this day as a reckoner against you. I need no witnesses. You do not listen to your soul, but listen instead to your anger and your rage.
they'll opportunistically derail it though. that's why i figured i'd throw them a bone
__________________
Your Lord knows very well what is in your heart. Your soul suffices this day as a reckoner against you. I need no witnesses. You do not listen to your soul, but listen instead to your anger and your rage.
It's not even just deaths. Overall violence is..well, since they love facts so much:
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Yikes! Those numbers are both tragic and damning at the same time. Awful.
__________________ Chicken Boo, what's the matter with you? You don't act like the other chickens do. You wear a disguise to look like human guys, but you're not a man you're a Chicken Boo.
Yeah, but those numbers and that chart are racist, Surt... shame on you, Nazi, for pointing out facts that hurt fee fees.
__________________ Paleontologists have tried to turn Archaeopteryx into an earth bound feathered dinosaur. But it is not. It is a bird, a perching bird. And no amount of 'paleobabble' is going to change that.-- Alan Feduccia-a world authority on birds, quoted in "Archaeopteryx:Early Bird Catches a Can of Worms," Science 1994, p.764-765
Re: Re: More than 300 black Americans (many unarmed) killed a year in the US
There are over five times as many white people as black people in this country, so even if that were true, black people would still be disproportionately killed more by police.
First, it is not a poll. Second, you are not understanding the statistics. The U.S. is a majority-white country. Therefore, it should be expected that whites will represent the majority of victims of incidents of violent crime. You know, by virtue of their being more white people than all other groups. If you are a perpetrator intent on committing a violent crime, you only have 2 out of 100 opportunities to attack an Asian person, but you have 3 out 5 opportunities to attack a white person. This is not hard.
KMC Community Forums
Jun 1st, 2020 09:33 AM
undoubtedly, they hate real facts.
