As you may have gathered from reading this article, the data here are kind of scattershot. The hope is that by framing police violence as a public health issue, our public health institutions like the National Institutes of Health will invest in it as seriously as any other public health issue, Feldman says.
Better funding and more research will give us more precise, reliable, and comprehensive data to understand the problem and identify the potential interventions and policy solutions that could help fix it. We need more research to understand at a granular level the ripple-out effects on the families, friends, and communities that lose someone to police violence.
She cites the example of Atatiana Jefferson, a year-old woman who was shot and killed by a white police officer through the bedroom window of her Texas home in October Why did they die? What kinds of stressors did they have from losing their daughter to police brutality?
Same thing with police violence. We need urgent action [and] we also need more research. The key is, again, approaching it as a problem we all need to deal with. We need to look upstream, Alang says, and understand how racism and white supremacy permeate and operate in all of our institutions—the health care system, the educational system, the criminal justice system—and understand how these systems impact public health, Alang explains.
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It reshapes how we think about police violence—for the general public, its victims, and its perpetrators. It can lead to more resources and research. Carolyn covers all things health and nutrition at SELF. Her definition of wellness includes lots of yoga, coffee, cats, meditation, self help books, and kitchen experiments with mixed results. Topics racism PTSD mental health protests anxiety stress public health.
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They are evidence of a racist system that disproportionately targets people of color for violence, imprisonment, and death. Tell your governor: Invest in our communities, not policing! We need real change. The police are not a neutral body, and the institution is inherently biased. In the U. Police forces have also become more militarized. Every year on-duty police kill an estimated 1, people. Despite the billions of dollars spent every year on policing, more than 15, people were killed by gun violence in alone—disproportionately young people of color.
If policing and imprisonment stopped violence, the U. But decades of evidence show us this is not the case. In Minneapolis and other U. Meanwhile, police murders continue, with 1, people shot and killed by police already this year. Our tax dollars must be reallocated from this system that regularly murders Black people with impunity—and instead invested in programs that strengthen our communities. Faced with budget shortfalls and urgent health care needs— at least 13 cities have made cuts to their police budgets.
What forms of training help most to reduce implicit bias and improve the situation? Ongoing research on these and other topics is the cornerstone of moving forward and improving the situation when it comes to the excessive use of force by police officers and the disproportionate impact that it has on racial minorities. What about defunding police departments? This is a tactic that has been brought up as a solution to police brutality. Defunding the police means taking money away from funding the police department and instead sending those funds to invest in the communities that are struggling the most and where most of the policing occurs.
It's very much similar to the concept of directing money toward prevention instead of dealing with problems after the fact. While not a simple solution, there is merit in funding programs and communities that are struggling instead of putting more people behind bars.
Understanding the psychology behind police brutality is the first step toward fixing the problem. Unfortunately, the situation is inherently one that needs to be fixed from the top down, beginning with the systems of government and how they allocate their funding. When better training and education is in place for police officers, as well as better mental health supports, then better outcomes may result.
It's also worth noting that while this problem seems to be most prominent in the United States, other countries may have their own racial tensions for example, in Canada and Australia there is tension between government and Indigenous people.
The United States, however, struggles more than most with the use of deadly force in the form of gun violence. For this reason, the psychology of police brutality is only one piece of the puzzle.
The other piece will be understanding the problem of gun violence in the United States, and how it compares to rates of gun violence in other countries. Learn the best ways to manage stress and negativity in your life. Amnesty International. Police violence. Department of Justice. Contacts Between Police and the Public, Published December J Soc Soc Work Res. From theoretical to empirical: Considering reflections of psychopathy across the thin blue line.
Personal Disord Theor Res Treat. Why it's so rare for police officers to face legal consequences. Published June 4, American Bar Association. Qualified immunity. Published December 17, D'Amore R.
Breonna Taylor: What we know about her death, the investigation and protests. Global News. Updated June 6, BBC News. George Floyd: What happened in the final moments of his life.
Published July 16, CBS News. Former Milwaukee officer not charged in fatal shooting of mentally ill man. Published December 22, O'Kane C. Eric Garner's mom says seeing a black man plead "I can't breathe" is "like a reoccurring nightmare". Published May 27, Family sues over fatal shooting at Ohio Wal-Mart.
Published December 16, Risk of being killed by police use of force in the United States by age, race-ethnicity, and sex. Racial profiling is a public health and health disparities issue. J Racial Ethn Health Disparities. Published May Center for Police Research and Policy. Published July Williams DR. J Health Soc Behav.
Johnson DK. Confirmation Bias and Police Brutality. Psychology Today. Published June 1, For this reason, police officers are, like the rest of us, required to wear seat belts at all times.
In reality, many choose not to wear them even when speeding through city streets. If I have to, be able to jump out of this deathtrap of a car. Despite the fact that fatal car accidents are a risk for police, officers like Doyle prioritize their ability to respond to one specific shooting scenario over the clear and consistent benefits of wearing a seat belt. Because officers are hyper-attuned to the risks of attacks, they tend to believe that they must always be prepared to use force against them — sometimes even disproportionate force.
Many officers believe that, if they are humiliated or undermined by a civilian, that civilian might be more willing to physically threaten them. But when the officer decides the suspect is disrespecting them or resisting their commands, they feel the need to use force to reestablish the edge. Police officers today tend to see themselves as engaged in a lonely, armed struggle against the criminal element.
They are judged by their effectiveness at that task, measured by internal data such as arrest numbers and crime rates in the areas they patrol. Rizer, the former officer and R Street researcher, recently conducted a separate large-scale survey of American police officers.
One of the questions he asked was whether they would want their children to become police officers. The rectangles represent the public and criminals, respectively; the blue line separating them is the police. In another, the blue line replaces the central white stripe in a black-and-white American flag, separating the stars from the stripes below. During the recent anti-police violence protests in Cincinnati, Ohio, officers raised this modified banner outside their station.
This emphasis on loyalty can create conditions for abuses, even systematic ones, to take place: Officers at one station in Chicago, Illinois, tortured at least Black suspects between and These crimes were uncovered by the dogged work of an investigative journalist rather than a police whistleblower. This insularity and siege mentality is not universal among American police. Worldviews vary from person to person and department to department; many officers are decent people who work hard to get to know citizens and address their concerns.
But it is powerful enough, experts say, to distort departments across the country. It has seriously undermined some recent efforts to reorient the police toward working more closely with local communities, generally pushing departments away from deep engagement with citizens and toward a more militarized and aggressive model.
Since the George Floyd protests began, police have tear-gassed protesters in different US cities. This is not an accident or the result of behaviors by a few bad apples.
Instead, it reflects the fact that officers see themselves as at war — and the protesters as the enemies. A study by Heidi Reynolds-Stenson, a sociologist at Colorado State University-Pueblo, examined data on 7, protests from to Policing in the United States has always been bound up with the color line.
In the South, police departments emerged out of 18th century slave patrols — bands of men working to discipline slaves, facilitate their transfer between plantations, and catch runaways. In the North, professional police departments came about as a response to a series of midth century urban upheavals — many of which, like the New York anti-abolition riot , had their origins in racial strife.
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