When a police officer shot Daunte Wright to death in a Minneapolis suburb last week, the tragedy plunged many Black Americans into a familiar state of grief and rage.
Wright, 20, became the latest Black person to die during an encounter with the police. The officer, who has since resigned, reportedly thought she was firing a Taser, not her gun. She's been charged with second-degree manslaughter.
Wright died about 10 miles from where former police officer Derek Chauvin has been on trial for murdering George Floyd. On Tuesday, Chauvin was found guilty of all three counts against him.
Since March 29, when the trial began, the New York Times found that more than three people died every day in confrontations with law enforcement, which roughly reflects the national average of a thousand-plus deaths per year. More than half of those who died were Black and Latino.
Listening to those most deeply affected by racial violence, the pain and exhaustion is obvious. Even when someone is far removed from the brutality, there's no escape from feeling anguish, fury, and hopelessness when such deaths happen often in their community or become major incidents that dominate social media and news coverage. In general, police officers are rarely charged or convicted when they kill someone.
So it should come as no surprise that well-known police killings like Wright's can lead to worse mental health for Black Americans specifically, but a new study provides new empirical evidence of that phenomenon.
The paper, published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, uses mental health survey and Google search data collected between 2012 and 2017 to better understand how police killings of Black individuals, decisions regarding the indictment or conviction of officers involved in those events, and white supremacist murders of Black victims during that time period influenced Black people's level of psychological distress following the initial violence.
The researchers found that when an officer wasn't convicted or indicted, the development most strongly predicted poorer mental health for Black Americans. White Americans experienced some decline related to publicized incidents of racial violence, but it wasn't statistically significant.
"Police killings create a culture of shame, trauma and anxiety."
While intuitive, the finding raises an urgent question: How can we treat police violence that disproportionately targets Black people as not just a policing problem but also a mental health crisis?
Yolo Akili Robinson, founder and executive director of the nonprofit Black Emotional And Mental Health Collective (BEAM), said in an email to Mashable that he's watched as friends and colleagues endure restless nights and anger that's directed inward. They describe the fear and cyclical trauma of police killings "as a heavy weight, crushing their heart." Murals and memorials dedicated to those victims become an every day reminder that those deaths "were never deemed worthy of justice."
"Police killings create a culture of shame, trauma and anxiety," wrote Robinson, who favors abolishing the police.
For Robinson, creating a genuine culture of safety would mean making police killings of Black people so rare that they wouldn't need to worry about dying at the hands of law enforcement. Instead of experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder thanks to constant vigilance over whether their children or partners would come home, Black people would feel safe and protected in their homes and on the roads.
"No more rage from generations of murders where officers didn't even get slaps on the wrists," he wrote.
Though Dr. David Stuart Curtis, a social scientist and an assistant professor of family and consumer studies at the University of Utah, didn't set out to provide solutions as a co-author of the new study, he believes some measures could alleviate the mental health toll that Black people may experience in the wake of a police killing.
Acknowledging that their mental health may be harmed by high-profile incidents of racial violence is important. That recognition, however, must also lead to changes in our public discussion of such events so that it reflects the communal grieving that takes place and effectively reduces the compounding stress of racist dialogue and politically controversial hot takes, Curtis says. Imagine, for example, taking the legacy and institutional nature of anti-Black violence seriously instead of routinely blaming victims of deadly force for non-compliance.
"I don't know how we facilitate a gentle, more truthful dialogue, but that's part of it," says Curtis, who studies community influences on health.
Even if new policies marginally decrease the use of lethal force, Curtis still expects high-profile police killings to negatively affect Black people's mental health. These deaths won't stop being societal stressors unless fundamental reforms dramatically reduce police killings while improving relations between law enforcement and Black Americans.
Dr. Atheendar Venkataramani, assistant professor of medical ethics and health policy at University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine, says Curtis' study successfully builds on past research showing an association between increased psychological distress for Black people in the aftermath of police killings.
Venkataramani conducted his own study on the subject, which was published in 2018 in The Lancet and found that police killings of unarmed black Americans were associated with worse mental health among Black Americans.
"We really need to provide trauma care to Black Americans," says Dr. Venkataramani.
"We really need to provide trauma care to Black Americans."
As one possibility, he envisions deploying teams of providers to communities affected by racial violence in order to talk to residents about their mental health. He also believes that it's essential to develop policies that reduce racial disparities in policing and criminal justice in the first place.
Robinson described abolishing the police as a true mental health intervention, noting that money spent on policing could be diverted to accessible housing, fully-funded community mental health centers, community gardens, sustainable living-wage salaries and jobs, and safety councils that "help our folks from care and not control and dominance."
"The somatic and psychological symptoms [of cyclical trauma] have become synonymous with how many understand Black culture and how we even understand ourselves, because we have never known a time when police were not agents of terror and violence against us," he wrote.
UPDATE: April 20, 2021, 2:10 p.m. PDT This story has been updated to include the verdict in Derek Chauvin's trial.
If you want to talk to someone or are experiencing suicidal thoughts, BEAM has a state-based list of mobile crisis teams, which provide urgent mental health evaluations and services, often without contacting the police. Crisis Text Line provides free, confidential support 24/7. Text CRISIS to 741741 to be connected to a crisis counselor. Contact the NAMI HelpLine at 1-800-950-NAMI, Monday through Friday from 10:00 a.m. – 8:00 p.m. ET, or email [email protected]. Here is a list of international resources.
