Showing posts with label police. Show all posts
Showing posts with label police. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 29, 2020

Prelude To Detroit: OVERSIGHT - "Confronting White Supremacy, Part IV" -Yet Nothing On Black Supremacy, Religion Or Gerrymandering

Yes, that is correct, race is the great American multi-trillion dollar industry. 

Did anyone discuss this?

Nope.

Want to know why?

Because it would mean we would have to address christianity, and no one wants to do that, or do they?

What about islam and its colored stratified history of social standing in the U.S.?

Then, if you are going to talk about judism, which is a subject matter no one dares to broach, including the Ashkenazi, then, you are going to have to talk about the history and Detroit.

If the committee really wanted to address civil rights and civil liberties, do you not think that a good starting point would be to explain the laws and the educational curriculum in our institutions of learning?

Race is taught through what is now called Predictive Modeling Crap.

I got one even better.

How about the committee talk about the foreign operatives who have infiltrated our law enforcement & law making institutions with their #coloredrevolution fairies?

Perhaps, it has something to do with cloaking why a civil rights legacy is not afforded due process, but, hey, what do I know?

I know no one has yet to define race, but like I always say, "Just as a scientist uses science, a racist uses race."


Always remember, Black Lives Matter, because the acquisition of goods, or rather stealin' the children, land & vote, is only done in the name of the tax exempt god to maximize the best interests of the child these foreign corporations own, in pilfering a national treasury, in need of Medicaid cost reimbursement and Faith Based Funding.

What about black supremacy?

Yes, there is black supremacy and it is not very pretty because there seems to be a strong presence in the Child Welfare System, but Rashida made a mockery of this fact in her dismographied, cloaking tale of a "racial attack about two foster kids".

Since Rashida raised foster care, I thought this to be an opportune moment to introduce "Targeted Populations" no one wants to talk about, particularly the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, considering this is her District, and all, ya know.





Gerrymandering: Congress makes the law, where police enforce the law, because those in power create the law, and we all know how political campaigns are funded.

This is about Parental Rights, where the resegregation is the latest financial grifting craze.

Praise the lord.

#maytheheavensfall


Voting is beautiful, be beautiful ~ vote.©

Sunday, July 12, 2020

Only Certain Black Lives Matter: The Detroit Shootings of Hakim Littleton, Kelvin Wheeler, NAN, NAACP & Kappa Alpha Psi


Image may contain: tree, house and outdoorFirst, this happened...

Once upon a time, a bunch of individuals in their early to late twenties, who came roaring into Detroit through the child welfare NGOs and christian youth groups, holed up in a bunch of Detroit Land Bank Authority blighted properties, and set up shop for the #coloredrevolution.



Then, this happened...

Image may contain: outdoor

Then, this happened...

Image may contain: sky, tree and outdoor

Then, this happened...

Image may contain: sky, tree and outdoor

Then, this happened...

Image may contain: car


Then, this hppened....

Randy Wimbley with Sam Riddle, who ran out the house
to greet the protesters in his NAN muscle shirt.

Then, this happened....

Detroit police chief's prompt body cam screening defuses post-shooting fallout


Then, this happened...
But, then, this happened...


I did not find any other media outlet, except for Buzzfeed, nor did I find any Detroit Black Lives Matter protest groups raise one eyebrow with a shooting which happened down the street, but I did come across this.

Salonika
http://www.tarencewheelerfoundation.com/
And, I found this, too.

http://www.mlui.org/mlui/news-views/articles-from-1995-to-2012.html?archive_id=486#.XwuqwChKg2w

Michigan Land Use Institute
Just as pianists must play their instrument’s black and white keys to make great music, so must America draw on her black and white citizens to make a great country. That is why the partnership between the Detroit Branch NAACP and the Michigan Land Use Institute is music to the ears of those who believe in reaching across racial, cultural, and geographic boundaries. And that is why our shared vision must resonate throughout Michigan, from its great southern cities to its splendid northern forests.

Heaster Wheeler
Hester Wheeler
Our hopeful partnership aims to replace the unfortunate dearth of urban voices addressing land use issues with a new song that unifies city and countryside in ways that, even very recently, few would have thought possible. Without it, there will be little progress in urban revitalization or land preservation.

Living for the City is a vital first step. Focusing on Detroit, we are addressing three issues crucial to its long-delayed renaissance: Public transit, affordable housing, and race relations.  
Public transit’s goals: Accessible, reliable, convenient, and affordable.
Detroit once operated the nation’s largest municipally owned transit system. Fifty years ago, that system annually carried 492 million riders; the Woodward Avenue trolleys rarely required more than a five-minute wait. Today, Detroit’s transit system is an embarrassment and a trial for those who use it. Yet one-third of Detroit residents have no car; for them, getting to work can be a nightmare. They are constantly at risk of losing their jobs because the buses often make them late for work. Dependable public transportation is a basic necessity that Detroit simply must regain.

https://beverlytran.blogspot.com/search?q=NAACP



#maytheheavensfall

Voting is beautiful, be beautiful ~ vote.©

Wednesday, July 8, 2020

Bankole "Boot Licker" Thompson Needs To Go Back To Africa For His Foreign Invasion Of Detroit, Livonia & His Psychotic Fantasy Of Owning His Very Own Bank

Bankole "The Boot Licker" Thompson has been on a #coloredrevolution tirade as of lately, by promoting his PULSE Institute.

The world is watching.

He likes to call NAACP Wendell "Swindle" Anthony a boot licker because he says the NAACP has done nothing but enrich themselves.

Yes, that is correct.

Bankole is giving his public testimony on the 2016 election fraud by letting the public witness his plans to take over Detroit and Livonia by enriching himself.

HA!

Bankole wants to own a black bank and I bet Maxine Waters will help him do it.

Yippers.

Bankole recently was victorious in his latest op, where I have a sneaky suspicion Reese Everson was a willing consultant in the Right to Literacy case, where, the Pulse Institute is going to get a chuck of the settlement that was supposed to be for Detroit Public Schools students whose needs are to stop public corruption.

The case was a mockery to the entire body of civil rights laws, but, that is not the point.

Bankole refuses to speak upon the Detroit Land Bank Authority because, he knows, when he does, he has to say my name, and he does not want to say my name because he will have to say my Sweetie's name.

Can I get a #MeToo?

Bankole leveraged his entire ethical core, or sold his soul down the river to the Congressional Black Caucus, to get this State of Michigan, backdoor Gretchen Whitmer #coloredrevolution funded  settlement so he can launch his next #coloredrevolution, and, in this situation, it shall be the City of Livonia and its Police Department to throw shade on the fact that this is Mike Duggan's old playground and that Gretch has some serious situations in the very near future.

A sign warning of racial profiling as seen on Telegraph Road in Redford Township just south of Interstate 96.Livonia mayor, police chief react to 'Driving While Black' warning billboard

I used to live in Livonia and learned how to swim as a very young girl at Clarenceville School, so I take this as another personal stab whenever I hear the afrocentristic war drums, knowing very well of the impending, foreign funded #coloredrevolution invasion of a municipality, for the simple fact that Bankole had the audacity to posthumously drop my Sweetie's name when they were all uber mean to my Sweetie, to simply make some money.

That vile creature needs to go back to Africa.

Yes, I am proclaiming that Bankole, and his tribe of "Legal Geniuses" (trademark pending) are about to topple the City of Livonia in major federal litigation because there are no officers of the darker persuassion.

So, I send this message out to Paul Bernier, City of Livonia Attorney and Police Chief Curtis Caid, as a heads up:

Why not step out there, onto the international stage, and ask Bankole, and his merry band of #coloredrevolution buckaneers, to provide the universally accepted framework in legal and genetic class based animus designation for black people-z, said with a 'z' because it is difficult to understand Bankole's foreign accent in his english, at times.

Image result for peter griffin race card
City of Livonia Police Department tool
to decide whom to pull over and ticket,
according to the #coloredrevolution psyop
of The PULSE Institute of Bankole
You should ask Bankole if his #coloredrevolutionary crew uses the brown paper bag test, or do they strictly go on proficiency tests in ebonics.

Seriously, someone should ask Bankole the magic question of how he determines who is eligible to bank at his fantasy black bank.

I mean, will he be using the Peter Griffin color coded race card or will the human asset property management re-segregation categories be based upon arbitrary and capricious decision making on who gets to live in his magical kingdom once he topples the City of Livonia.

I bet they change the name of Livonia to Bankole.

"Hey Mikey! Come out, come out, wherever you are at GO BLUE, Bankole wants to play games with democracy.


Bankole is so very considerate to provide for the public record that propaganda was promoted through our higher institutions of learning, which will then, profess in the community, the policy of which the black peoplez shall be indoctrinated through federal funding.

I do not know whether to call this sedition or treachery.

Gotta spend some time with a few bottles of Merlot to construct this matrix.

Perhaps, Bankole is working with Anthony Borgesi, founder of Black Lives Matter operation, which is not organic, yet highly sophisticated, but, hey, what do I know?

I know Bankole is using the internet to promulgate an insurgency against the City of Livonia.

I also know Bankole is still, at this very moment, plotting and scheming to become a king, because, he has nothing else to live for, for he knows, in some vague shape or form, that we are in Detroit.

#maytheheaavensfall


Voting is beautiful, be beautiful ~ vote.©

Friday, June 19, 2020

Prelude To Detroit: Black Lives Matter Is A Cover For Medicaid Fraud In Child Welfare - Juneteenth

Well, it seems to me, 
As I can see, 
Black Lives Matter
Is but a cover
For Medicaid Fraud in Child Welfare.

Welcome To Detroit.

Slavery was never abolished, they just changed the name to child welfare.



Well, that was fast.

This account has been terminated due to multiple or severe violations of YouTube's policy prohibiting content designed to harass, bully or threaten. 

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrQ-wHKVi0JDWjQGcuoYnew

Then, this happened....

Twitter labels video tweeted by Trump as 'manipulated media'

Then, this happened....

Then, this happened...

  Parent of toddler in 'manipulated' President Trump video forces Facebook and Twitter to remove it

Welcome to the world of child welfare propaganda.

https://beverlytran.blogspot.com/search?q=slavery

#maytheheavensfall

Voting is beautiful, be beautiful ~ vote.©

Tuesday, June 16, 2020

Senate Judiciary Hearing On Police, Qualified Immunity & Race - With Colored Commentary On How To Solve It All

How to change the entire concept, reputation and direction of the police?


Let the people do the policing for the state, with bounty, in partnership with local law enforcement, as the original concept of policing was designed.

Ok, now that we have that out the way....

Baby Archie's First Birthday: Meghan Markle and Prince Harry's ...
Will Baby Archie, the black
African American
qualify for a reparations check?
What does hearing fail to address?

Child welfare.

Why?

Because Child Protective Services is not recognized as police.

CPS is gerrymandering and SCOTUS said gerrymandering was constitutional.

That means slave law is still on the books.

Idiots.

No knock police warrants suck because CPS will use exigent circumstances doctrine to get the police to kick in your doors in the middle of the night, without warrant to save the children, because, according to the latest foreign university crap being promulgated, black people abuse their kids more, because poverty is child abuse.

The body of literature on this crap is vast, where people are still citing pre-Emancipation Proclamation legal doctrines to justify using race to make money.

City police consent agreements filed in the courts are fake because the administrators are private corporations, that are foreign funded, to keep using race as a reason to continue the oversight, so they can keep getting that check.

Just ask Kwame Kilpatrick after he is released from prison to tell his tale of Kroll's roll in the Detroit Police Department Consent Agreement and how that all worked out.

I have my own tale of that Consent Agreement and the Consent Agreement in Nancy Edmuds court, which is all infested with fake ass race crap to demonstrate their improvement and justifiable attorney fees billing practices.

Qualified immunity is used not just by police to kill someone, it is also used by Foster Care private contractors, who have foreign parents like Orchards Children's Services or Bethany Christian, or any other of the Catholic Charities trafficking tiny humans organizations.

Indemnification is a private issue with the private corporate shape shifter and their insurance companies, which means the States are not held liable, with that Eleventh Amendment Immunity, and the Right to Lie case, that was overturned to say that foster care workers cannot lie to snatch and sell a kid, that no one will enforce.

If the private, foreign foster care agency is busted killing a kid in its care, like Ricky Holland, or another little boy, who just kept coming back to life, it will just shutdown, restructure as a corporate shape shifter and rename itself like St. Vincent Sarah Fisher and Catholic Social Services did.

How should we deal with qualified immunity of law enforcement officers?

How about invoking that most beautiful Second Amendment to strip them of their right to keep and bear the arms of their respective well armed militia, to fall from the heavens, to be held accountable to the voting rights of a grand jury for prosecution on the land by the laws of the people.

There is no indemnification issues for the law enforcement agencies, the States or the U.S. because they have been defrocked, removed from office of the public trust, because they breached the children's trust called posterity.

Ok, now that I solved the issue of qualified immunity, allow us to move on.

Why is law enforcement systemically racist?

Because it was built on the peculiar institution that gets funded by race.

Think about a posse of bounty slave catchers, but instead of being on horseback, they are riding in squad cars.

Does this vision capture the fear many individuals of the darker persuasion have when rushed by law enforcement, weapons drawn and cocked?

How about this Child Protective Services gerrymandering example of structural, federal funded racism because it is still legal to procure and purvey tiny humans.



If a scientist uses science, then, a racist uses race.

Q: How the hell does one explain a statistical significance in a standard deviation of a race study?

A: When someone in your controlled population goes to the tanning booth, one too many times.

There are one drop laws on the books of the States where one is legally labeled as black, as noted on one's birth certificate, up to 1/78th which means you may be black in one state, but as soon as you cross a state line, you are no longer black in another state.

Take the Homer Plessey case.

Homer of 1/8th of African descent, with blue eyes, blonde hair, and did not suntan very well.

The court said he was a product of an unfortunate union, which created the separate, yet equal legal doctrine to assign race because the case was about the right of association, under the First Amendment.

If you are labeled black, you have no right of association, which means the First Amendment failed, defaulting allow one to proceed to the Second Amendment to seek justice because the courts are dumb, because they use race as property ownership in class based animus decisions.

I would love to file a class action lawsuit on behalf of all the octroons just so I could get the court to opine, then, during the pendency of the case, go file in another circuit another class action case on behalf of quadroons, while transposing my race based legal model to even another circuit, on behalf of mullatos, just so I can castigate them, in the spirit of fuchsia, with their own case law, by moving all the courts for removal to SCOTUS by enjoining the cases.

Publicly popping judicial hubris like a pustular boil in legal arguments is far more satisfying than offering me a settlement check to shut me up.

Structural racism is chattel law because there is a hierarchy of human property ownership and it is funded through public and private institutions of belief and education.

Just look at child welfare literature.

No.

Wait.

Watch this video on race being a revenue maximizing fraud scheme.



It is called Parental Rights where, under that fake ass doctrine of Partus Sequitur Ventrum, where every time you label yourself with one of the bodily fluids, such as bile, you make public attestment that you are of the lower rung on the socioeconomic status ladder in society.

It is not that deep ~ race makes money ~ just ask Cory Booker.
Tiny human bondage is what the sophisticated populous most readily understands as slavery.

The Corporate Shape Shifters of those fake ass Public Private Partnerships like to leverage Social Impact Bonds in race based programs, because they make up their facts to base their evidence in Predictive Modeling Crap to garner the best interests of the child in corporate layering of financial leveraging instruments.

It is all public information.

Click the links or just do a search in the top right boolean on my blog to make your own novella to read as you talk a walk or just sun bathe at the beach, but do not get too suntanned or someone might label and assign you to the black variable.

Google works just as well.

The Bible was written to reinforce the institutions to maintain this hierarchy of human property ownership because it was funded by privateers so they could invade foreign lands to go a-stealin' the children, land & votes.

I like the Curse of the Sons of Ham tale in the Geneva Bible because our law is Noahidic and it says the darker you are, the more sin you have, which means you can be salvaged for your assets like children, land and vote, for the simple fact that the ones in power are the ones who write the laws.

The people who write the laws are elected by the Vatican, where their campaigns are funded by those who have vested interests in the investment of their candidates.

There is even Papal Bull on it, Dum Diversas.

The U.S. came up with the post-Emancipation Proclamation legal doctrine of human property ownership called gerrymandering, and I just went full circle on why the use of race is like using a horse and buggy to space mine on astroids.

Think about that for a few minutes to fully embrace my point of logic on race, piercing deep within your heart and soul.

So, just a reminder, until someone comes up with a quantitative tool of measurement that is universally accepted to publish a functioning, legal determination on how one came up with the human asset management categories of race beyond a ship's manifest, and who died and made someone else to be the king of labeling other humans to a monetary race assignment, as witnessed in federal funding of operations for targeted populations, I am going to call it all crap because people are inherently obsequious to religious institutions, because they are the ones pushing the race crap through the educational system.

It starts with children because no one cares.

How to stop racism?

Stop using race!

It is stupid.

It is the world's greatest fraud, just look at the Congressional Black Caucus and the NAACP because race is a cover for foreign, covert ops for stealin' the children, land and vote.

The christian human traffickers are incorporating race as a legal disability so they can go on that salvific mission and get corporate guardianship over their legal chattel, again, so they can continue pilfering the national treasury.

It is arcane.

It is tautological.

It is a logical fallacy.

It is human trafficking.

It is the residual of the peculiar institution.



We need to stop funding this crap.

We need to stop promulgate this crap.

We need to expose this crap as a tool of foreign invasion by the Privateers who ran the coup which interfered in the 2016 election.

No more studies on race.

Let the war crimes tribunals commence because we, the people, have the right to a civil society.

#maytheheavensfall

Abstract

We investigated links between police brutality and poor health outcomes among Blacks and identified five intersecting pathways: (1) fatal injuries that increase population-specific mortality rates; (2) adverse physiological responses that increase morbidity; (3) racist public reactions that cause stress; (4) arrests, incarcerations, and legal, medical, and funeral bills that cause financial strain; and (5) integrated oppressive structures that cause systematic disempowerment.
Public health scholars should champion efforts to implement surveillance of police brutality and press funders to support research to understand the experiences of people faced with police brutality. We must ask whether our own research, teaching, and service are intentionally antiracist and challenge the institutions we work in to ask the same.
To reduce racial health inequities, public health scholars must rigorously explore the relationship between police brutality and health, and advocate policies that address racist oppression.
Police brutality toward Blacks in the United States is not new. However, in the absence of a standard definition or good data, the extent of police brutality remains difficult to quantify. Historical evidence of public harming of Black bodies by police dates back at least to the era of slavery, when police disciplined Blacks and recaptured those who escaped enslavement. With current technology, police killing of Black people is recorded for public scrutiny and consumption. Access to these videos has led to unprecedented public discourse on what constitutes brutality, its connections to White supremacy, and the consequences for Black lives.
Certainly, excessive use of physical violence constitutes brutality. But as others have noted, brutality goes beyond physical force. It includes emotional and sexual violence as well as verbal assault and psychological intimidation. Bandes argues that the term “brutality” conveys more than police misconduct: “It is police conduct that is not merely mistaken, but taken in bad faith, with the intent to dehumanize and degrade its target.”(p1276) We argue for these more expansive definitions of brutality but also believe that police actions that constitute brutality and that dehumanize and degrade occur even in the absence of conscious intent.
Blacks are significantly more likely to experience police brutality than are Whites, and whiteness affords protection against police use of force. Racially disparate use of force indicates that White supremacy—the systematic positive assessments of whiteness that go hand-in-hand with the devaluation of blackness—permeates the US law enforcement system. White supremacy and structural racism (norms, laws, and policies that operate in institutions to limit life chances for communities of color) negatively affect health. We argue that police brutality is a social determinant of health, although it has not received sufficient attention from the public health community. To date, little empirical work has linked police brutality to poor health among populations who disproportionately experience brutality. To generate discourse and more research on this subject, we propose five intersecting mechanisms through which police brutality is linked to excess morbidity among Blacks at both the individual and the community level:
  1. fatal injuries that increase population-specific mortality rates;
  2. adverse physiological responses that increase morbidity;
  3. racist public reactions that cause stress;
  4. arrests, incarcerations, and legal, medical, and funeral bills that cause financial strain; and
  5. integrated oppressive structures that cause systematic disempowerment.

PHYSICAL INJURIES AND DEATH

A direct pathway between police brutality and health is through injury and death. The most comprehensive information about the connection between race and death during police encounters comes from data collected by a UK newspaper, The Guardian. Analysis of those data concluded that in 2015, “young Black men were nine times more likely than other Americans to be killed by police officers.”
For some victims of police brutality, death is not immediate but results from repeated physical injury while in police custody. In 2005, Dondi Johnson was arrested in Baltimore, Maryland, for public urination and placed in a police vehicle. Mr. Johnson entered the police vehicle in otherwise good health and left a quadriplegic, later dying from injuries sustained in the vehicle. Other high-profile cases of death as a result of maltreatment in police custody include Freddie Gray (Baltimore, MD, 2015) and Sandra Bland (Waller County, TX, 2015).
Police killings increase Black-specific mortality rates. Even though only two percent of injuries from police interventions that require treatment in the emergency department or hospital result in death, Blacks are almost five times more likely than are Whites to have a police intervention-related injury. Little is known about the prevalence of nonlethal police violence that results in injury or disability. This is an area for further investigation.

PSYCHOLOGICAL STRESS

Each episode of police brutality has emotional and physiological effects on individuals and communities. Witnessing or experiencing harassment, routine unwarranted searches, and deaths that go unpunished send a message to Black communities that their bodies are police property, disposable, and undeserving of dignity and justice. Videos such as that of Eric Garner (New York, NY, 2014) saying, “I can’t breathe” 11 times until he lost consciousness or that of Diamond Reynolds (the girlfriend of Philando Castile, who was killed by police in Falcon Heights, MN, 2016) stating to the police officer, “You shot four bullets into him, sir. He was just getting his license and registration, sir” might elicit historical memories of lynching and can bring about collective anger, grief, and hopelessness. Defending the character of loved ones after the police have killed them can also be excruciating, eliciting more negative emotions. Although warranted, these emotions might be damaging to individual mental health and might elevate distress at the population level.
Experiencing or witnessing police brutality, hearing stories of friends who have experienced brutality, and having to worry about becoming a victim are all stressors. When faced with a threat, the body produces hormones and other signals that turn on the systems that are necessary for survival in the short term. These changes include accelerated heart rate and increased respiratory rate. But when the threat becomes reoccurring and persistent—as is the case with police brutality—the survival process becomes dangerous and causes rapid wear and tear on body organs and elevated allostatic load. Deterioration of organs and systems caused by increased allostatic load occurs more frequently in Black populations and can lead to conditions such as diabetes, stroke, ulcers, cognitive impairment, autoimmune disorders, accelerated aging, and death.

RACIST PUBLIC REACTIONS

Black people often have the task of explaining to non-Black friends, co-workers, and strangers the connection between structural racism and the latest police shooting. This is a profoundly stressful process to undergo while grieving these deaths. One example of a racist public reaction that might cause stress is arguing that victims were somehow responsible for their own untimely murders—dissecting the guilt or innocence of the murdered persons versus understanding how White supremacy might have caused this. Another example is when protests that call for systemic change and accountability come under the scrutiny of the police, media, and other predominantly White institutions that judge the manner of protest as unacceptable.
Society’s predominant underreaction to incidents of police brutality can be stressful as well. Black women, men, and children wake up to another incident of a police killing on the morning news or on social media and are expected to go about their daily activities as though it does not affect them. But exposure to such videos can be traumatic and can affect well-being over the life course. In addition, it is painful for Black people to go to work and see business as usual while they are feeling devalued. The expectation of business as usual, the profound scrutiny of Black people’s reaction to police brutality, and the justification of police killings are potential sources of racial stress that we know to be directly and indirectly linked to poor health.

ECONOMIC AND FINANCIAL STRAIN

Police brutality affects individual and community health through its toll on productivity and on the economy. In addition to job loss after incarceration, survivors of brutality may have to deal with disabilities resulting from police use of excessive force. Disability decreases productivity and the ability to accumulate financial resources.
Police brutality also affects the economic productivity of Black communities because loved ones take time away from paid work to grieve, plan and attend funerals, and organize protests. These events result from police brutality, and they take away resources that are already limited in Black communities as a result of structural racism. Financial strain and poverty affect the health of Blacks by limiting access to healthy food, exposing families to environmental hazards and poor housing conditions, and making it harder to access health services.

BLACK COMMUNITIES’ SYSTEMATIC DISEMPOWERMENT

The impact of police brutality is much broader than simply affecting the individuals who have experienced racialized violence. It is a constant reminder of the historic and current devaluing of Black lives. It sends a signal that there is little hope for justice. Excessive police force and inadequate prosecution of perpetrators might increase feelings of powerlessness in the Black community, diminishing perceptions of gains made by the civil rights movement.
Frequently, the only semblance of justice for victims of police brutality is to gain sympathizers in the court of public opinion. To do this, Black people seemingly have no other option than to make public the videos or photographs that show the private and last moments of loved ones’ lives. The perceived lack of justice can breed mistrust in law enforcement, further hurting the relationship between the police and Black communities. This might limit access to appropriate and necessary law enforcement services such as protection from violent crime and timely intervention during emergencies and disasters.
The impact of police brutality on the well-being of the Black community parallels the effects of the racism that exists in so many other aspects of everyday life: education, housing, employment, and health care. That Black people can be harassed and even killed by police is sadly not inconsistent with a system that gives some children, but not others, a high-quality education and that allows skin color to dictate employment opportunity or chances of dying from a preventable disease. Understanding how police brutality affects health requires seeing it both as the action of individual police officers and as part of a system of structural racism that operates to sustain White supremacy. A silver lining is that police brutality has given rise to movements, such as Black Lives Matter and Blacktivist, that resist systemic oppression of Blacks and advocate their rights to live freely and with dignity. However, the existence of these movements does not erase the feelings of powerlessness that affect well-being in Black communities.

AGENDA FOR PUBLIC HEALTH SCHOLARS

At the forefront of public health are discussions of preventable causes of death, illness, and disease. Police brutality is highly preventable. As public health scholars, our agenda should include generating evidence of the causal relationship between police brutality and health inequities and seeking solutions.
A primary challenge in understanding the impact of police brutality on health is the lack of data. The fact that the best data to date come from newspapers such as The Guardian and The Washington Post is humbling. The National Violent Death Reporting System offers some estimates of deaths linked to police intervention, but not all states participate. Treating law enforcement–related deaths as we would notifiable conditions may be useful for identifying strategies to prevent mortality from police brutality. It is encouraging that recent Bureau of Justice Statistics efforts are focused on collecting more comprehensive data about arrest-related deaths. The Bureau of Justice Statistics and other federal agencies such as the National Center for Health Statistics should continue to invest in active and passive surveillance of police use of force, perhaps collaboratively, as an issue of fair policing, justice, and population health.
We must require national surveys that collect data about health and stress to include stressors that are pertinent to all individuals. Simple questions about how often respondents have been pulled over by police (Philando Castile was reportedly pulled over 49 times in 13 years), how often respondents are followed in stores, and so on can be powerful indicators of the types of everyday stressors that are the products of racism. We must also press funders to support qualitative research that seeks to understand the lived experiences of people faced with police brutality.
Ethnographies, case studies, and interviews might help us better understand the nature of police brutality, the context in which it is experienced, and how it affects well-being. Qualitative work has described how frequent adverse encounters have led Blacks to be negatively disposed toward police. Qualitative work might help us understand the extent to which poor health among Blacks is similarly grounded in everyday experiences of police intimidation, violence, and brutality.
The absence of perfect data is not an excuse for our neglect. Public health scholars can use publicly available data from sources such as the Police–Public Contact Survey conducted by the Bureau of Justice Statistics and the New York City Stop and Frisk program. With these data they can begin documenting evidence by assessing whether people who report experiencing excessive use of force also belong to groups that are more likely to have negative health outcomes. One study using these data found higher rates of adverse health conditions such as high blood pressure among Blacks living in highly and inequitably policed areas regardless of their individual negative contact with police. More studies like this are needed. Partnerships with police departments may enable researchers to extract information from available event reports and summaries to generate useful data sets.
We will be limited in our ability to achieve health equity if all our measures of social inequality and determinants of health are racially coded. Public health has prided itself on its strong focus on social justice and equity. Public health readily examines consequences and by-products of racism such as poverty, lower health literacy, environmental pollutants, and lack of access to services among Blacks. We encourage scholars to purposefully go beyond these by-products and highlight racism and White supremacy as the issues that underlie racial health inequities. Black Lives Matter and similar movements play a role in exposing White supremacy and dismantling racism. It might be useful to explore the impact of these contemporary movements on the social, economic, and political empowerment and well-being of Black communities.
In addition to research, our work in advocacy and policy development should confront oppression in all its forms. At the 2016 Annual Meeting in Denver, Colorado, the American Public Health Association resolved to bring the issue of police violence to the forefront of public policy. Among several advocacy action steps in a policy statement, the American Public Health Association urges federal, state, and local governments to demilitarize police, decriminalize behaviors such as loitering and minor traffic violations, end racialized stop and frisk, and invest in addressing root causes of instability among Black communities. An understudied issue that also requires the attention of public health practitioners and health care workers is how police brutality might breed distrust in health care institutions, especially if institutional policies require health care workers to identify suspects of behaviors considered criminal.
Finally, we must ask ourselves if our own research, teaching, and service are fundamentally and unapologetically antiracist. For example, our schools and programs must include systematic ongoing training on skills for navigating racial bias (explicit and implicit) in and outside of the classroom. This requires critical self-consciousness so faculty and practitioners become comfortable with the language and concepts of antiracist praxis and naming racism and White supremacy. We must also hold our institutions, programs, and departments of health accountable to centering at the margins and deliberately taking the perspectives of marginalized groups.
Confronting ourselves and the institutions that pay us is uncomfortable—for us, our collaborators, the administration, and our students. But discomfort can produce the best scholarship. We cannot champion efforts to eradicate racial health inequities without interrogating how our own scholarship might be influenced by structural racism and its consequences in the Black community.
Even though we focus on Blacks in this commentary, the pathways we have specified and the agenda we have proposed should be used to explore health inequities across a range of marginalized populations, including Native Americans and Latinos, who experience police brutality at alarmingly high rates. We must continue to assemble evidence that will move us closer to dismantling the systems that maintain excess morbidity and mortality, especially among historically oppressed groups.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We thank the editor and reviewers for their thoughtful comments. We acknowledge the suffering of families that have been directly affected by police brutality, a few of whose experiences we cite.

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