LANSING — Alma G. Stallworth, a longtime state House representative from Detroit who founded the Michigan Legislative Black Caucus Foundation, died Tuesday at age 87.
A trailblazer who was the longtime chair of the House Public Utilities Committee in the days before Michigan term limits, Stallworth played a key role in creating legislation that regulates and deregulates electric and telephone companies and other utilities in Michigan.
Alma Stallworth
Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, Stallworth was first elected to the state House in 1970, serving first through 1974, then without interruption from 1983 through 1996. She served a final term from 2003 through 2004. She also served on the board of Detroit Public Schools after a 2005 appointment.
Stallworth's two sons, Thomas and Keith, also served in the Michigan Legislature.
Thomas F. Stallworth III said on Facebook Tuesday that her death came less than a year after the death of his father.
"Mom has joined Dad, her partner of 65 years, in the arms of the Lord after living long full lives," he said. "We have truly been blessed to have them and I will rejoice in continuing to hear their voices in all that I do."
Alma Stallworth was known for her work improving foster care in Michigan and fighting child abuse. She served as president of the metro Detroit affiliate of the National Black Child Development Institute and as a board member of the Federation of Girls Homes and the Children's Aid Society of Michigan, according to her legislative biography.
The Black Caucus Foundation works on policy issues and diversity training, among other areas, and has fellowship and internship programs for students.
In 1988, Stallworth was part of an official delegation that observed the German elections uniting east and west Berlin.
"Alma helped pave the way for Black legislators and her legacy lives on through them, including her own sons," said House Minority Leader Christine Greig, D-Farmington Hills.
"We owe her a debt of gratitude for her years of public service. I offer my deepest condolences to Alma’s many loved ones and admirers.”
The case is about a mother about to have her rights terminated to her ninth child.
The man judge said, "she should know how this works since she lost her eight previous kids."
So, I guess the case is about the attorney and, I shall assume the court, that the mother was not advised of her civil rights in the course of her Child Protective Services case.
{this is the point where I am going to walk away for a few moments to ground myself in that glorious chi, so I do not say anything too disparigning about these "Legal Geniuses" (trademark pending).
Each and everyone one of these individuals need to fall from the heavens.
These people refuse to accept that Michigan lies, promulgates lies through child welfare propaganda for the purposes of selling tiny human chattel.
When a mother has a child snatched and sold by the State, they typically will have another child to fill that void.
In Michigan, a previous termination of parental rights is automatic grounds for termination to all posterity of the mother, and sometimes the father, for all eternity.
This case is about a mother who was poor and in need of help she never received because someone checked that "reasonable efforts" box.
If these "Legal Geniuses" (trademark pending) cannot even mention fraud upon the court in the generation of false claims to be published in the public record, then how the hell can the mother understand.
Why do these parents take pleas?
Because it ends the suffering of her children's hopes of going home so they can move on to a life of being drugged, raped, tortured, and lab rated.
Vivek Sankaran is grooming an army to continue cloaking the Michigan industry of trafficking tiny humans because he refuses to mention the fraud and corruption.
Interestingly, the next case is being adjudicated under the same transposable model in the termination of parental rights, in SNAP licensing.
She got desensitized by the screams because the screams of children is an industry.
Someone needs to go ask her about her history with the Michigan Catholic Conference and the Archdiocese of Detroit, because Cornelius died by Medicaid Fraud in Child Welfare.
I am quite sure the facilities carry indemnification insurance coverage....and a life insurance policy on Cornelius....
WEST BLOOMFIELD, Mich. (AP) - A civil lawsuit filed Monday following the death of a 16-year-old in a Michigan youth facility says he screamed "I can't breathe" as at least one staff member placed their weight on the Black teen's chest for nearly 10 minutes.
The lawsuit filed in Kalamazoo County Circuit Court names Lakeside Academy in Kalamazoo and Sequel Youth and Family Services as defendants.
Cornelius Fredericks died May 1 after going into cardiac arrest April 29. At the time, authorities said he was being restrained by staff after throwing a sandwich.
His death came nearly a month before George Floyd died May 25 in Minneapolis with a white police officer's knee pressing his neck to the ground.
Floyd's dying words, "I can't breathe," have become a rallying call for people protesting police violence against Black people and racial injustice during demonstrations across the U.S.
"The excessive use of restraints and the lack of concern for Cornelius's life draw an eerily similar comparison to that of George Floyd's death," according to the lawsuit, which alleges negligence and says Lakeside staff improperly and wrongfully used restraints on Fredericks.
Authorities have not provided details of the race of the staff member or members involved.
"Video from Lakeside Academy even shows a staff member placing his/her weight directly on Cornelius's chest for nearly ten minutes as Cornelius lost consciousness," the lawsuit states. "Cornelius's scream of `I can't breathe' was not enough to get the staff members to stop the excessive restraint."
Detroit attorney Jon Marko, who filed the civil rights lawsuit, said he has yet to view the video, but that he spoke with the mother of another child in the facility.
That child "claims to have heard Cornelius scream `I can't breathe,"' Marko said, adding that a state Health and Human Services Department report confirmed that account.
The lawsuit seeks damages allowed under the Michigan Wrongful Death Act. No financial amount was specified.
The Associated Press left a message Monday seeking comment from Lakeside Academy.
Sequel Youth and Family Services told The AP in an email that it cannot comment on pending legal matters, but that it has terminated all staff involved and removed the former executive director of Lakeside.
"We have been in regular contact with law enforcement and state officials to help ensure justice is served and have accelerated the work that was already underway across our organization to move to a restraint-free model of care," the company said. "We take our obligation to meet the significant behavioral health needs of all our students incredibly seriously and remain focused on our mission of providing the absolute best care and treatment possible."
The foster care system or parents placed youths in Lakeside Academy, a residential treatment facility about 140 miles west of Detroit, to receive behavioral health services after being abused or neglected.
Fredericks was a ward of the state, Marko told reporters Monday.
His aunt, Tenia Goshay, is named in the lawsuit as the representative of Fredericks' estate. The teen's mother is dead. His father and rest of the family were not in a position to care for him, Marko said.
Fredericks had been at Lakeside Academy about two years, Goshay told reporters.
"I want to know what happened to my nephew," she said.
The state last week terminated its contracts with Lakeside for youth in Michigan's foster care and juvenile justice systems and said all 125 youth at Lakeside were placed in other "settings based on their individual needs."
The facility also had its license to operate suspended.
Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has told the department to cut ties with Sequel Youth and Family Services, which provided staffing to Lakeside Academy.
After Fredericks' death, Lakeside Academy officials said what happened didn't reflect the institution's mission to "serve and care for our clients with excellence."
But Michigan's Health and Human Services department has conducted more than 30 investigations since 2016 on maintenance, staff qualifications, discipline, behavior management, resident restraint and staff sufficiency at Lakeside Academy, the lawsuit said.
Six months prior to Fredericks' death there were six separate violations pertaining to improper use by staff of deescalation techniques, including improper restraints, according to the lawsuit, and at least eight employees had been fired since 2016 due to improper use of restraints, failure to use proper deescalation techniques or improperly supervising youth.
Michigan Health and Human Services officials have said an investigation of the for-profit academy found 10 licensing violations, including a failure to follow rules related to resident restraint and discipline.
LANSING, Mich. — Prompted by the death of a teen who was wrongly restrained by staff, a Michigan facility for teenagers with behavioral problems on Thursday lost its contract with the state to care for youth in the state’s foster care and juvenile justice systems and its license to operate.
The termination of the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services’ contract with Lakeside Academy in Kalamazoo came in the wake of the death last month of Cornelius Frederick. The 16-year-old went into cardiac arrest while being restrained on April 29 by Lakeside Academy staff. He died May 1. At the time, authorities said the teen was being restrained by staff after he threw a sandwich.
In announcing the termination of its contract and suspension of the operating license, Health and Human Services said an investigation of the for-profit Lakeside Academy found 10 licensing violations, including a failure to follow rules related to resident restraint and discipline. The agency contends the revocation of the license of a child caring institution is rare and occurs when there are serious licensing violations that make closure necessary to protect children.
Lakeside Academy officials did not immediately return calls for comment.
“MDHHS continues to mourn the loss of this young man’s life, which came needlessly to an end at the hands of those meant to care for him” said JooYeun Chang, executive director of the MDHHS Children’s Services Agency, in a prepared statement. “We are committed to protecting children and will not accept the completely unnecessary death of a youth who is deprived of the opportunity to grow up, complete his education, begin a career, and start a family.”
Kalamazoo County Prosecuting Attorney Jeff Getting said Thursday his office is reviewing completed investigations to determine if criminal charges are authorized in Frederick’s death.
"If charges are brought, my office will be prosecuting the cases,’’ Getting said.
At the time of Frederick’s death, Lakeside Academy officials said in a statement the incident didn’t reflect the institution’s mission to ``serve and care for our clients with excellence.”
However, Assistant Chief David Boysen of the Kalamazoo Department of Public Safety has said in the weeks leading up to Frederick’s death there were numerous calls for false fire alarms, runaway students and assaults. In addition, three chaotic days followed the boy’s death, as students fought and fled the facility.
Just before Health and Human Services announced its moves, the Legal Rights Center in Minneapolis called for Hennepin County, Minnesota, to stop placing children in Lakeside Academy for juvenile delinquency matters.
The county removed all Minnesota children from the facility after Frederick's death. However, center officials said that was is enough. They contend it is time to end the practice of removing children from local communities and confining them in correction facilities "under the pretense of providing therapeutic treatment."
In the weeks leading up to the incident, Kalamazoo Department of Public Safety received an increase of calls for false fire alarms, runaway students and assaults, Assistant Chief David Boysen said.
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....
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.
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 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.
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.1 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.2–4 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.”2(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.5,6 Racially disparate use of force indicates that White supremacy—the systematic positive assessments of whiteness that go hand-in-hand with the devaluation of blackness7—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)8 negatively affect health.4,8 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:
fatal injuries that increase population-specific mortality rates;
adverse physiological responses that increase morbidity;
racist public reactions that cause stress;
arrests, incarcerations, and legal, medical, and funeral bills that cause financial strain; and
integrated oppressive structures that cause systematic disempowerment.
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.9 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.”6
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.10 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).10
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,11 Blacks are almost five times more likely than are Whites to have a police intervention-related injury.12 Little is known about the prevalence of nonlethal police violence that results in injury or disability. This is an area for further investigation.
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.3 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 lynching13 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.14
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.15 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.15 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.15,16
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.17
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.11 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.18
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.13 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.8,17 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.
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.19 Treating law enforcement–related deaths as we would notifiable conditions may be useful for identifying strategies to prevent mortality from police brutality.9 It is encouraging that recent Bureau of Justice Statistics efforts are focused on collecting more comprehensive data about arrest-related deaths.20 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.21 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.22 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.17 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.23 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.24 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.24,25
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.
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.
1. Blackmon DA. Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans From the Civil War to World War II. New York, NY: Anchor; 2009. [Google Scholar]
2. Bandes S. Patterns of injustice: police brutality in the courts. Buffalo Law Review. 1999;47(3):1275–1342. [Google Scholar]
3. Chaney C, Robertson RV. Racism and police brutality in America. J Afr Am Stud. 2013;17(4):480–505. [Google Scholar]
4. Cooper HL, Fullilove M. Editorial: excessive police violence as a public health issue. J Urban Health. 2016;93(suppl 1):1–7. [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
5. Kahn KB, Goff PA, Lee JK, Motamed D. Protecting whiteness: White phenotypic racial stereotypicality reduces police use of force. Soc Psychol Personal Sci. 2016;7(5):403–411. [Google Scholar]
7. Bonilla-Silva E. White Supremacy and Racism in the Post-Civil Rights Era. Boston, MA: Lynne Rienner; 2001. [Google Scholar]
8. Gee GC, Ford CL. Structural racism and health inequities: old issues, new directions. Du Bois Rev. 2011;8(1):115–132. [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
9. Krieger N, Chen JT, Waterman PD, Kiang MV, Feldman J. Police killings and police deaths are public health data and can be counted. PLoS Med. 2015;12(12):e1001915. [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
11. Miller TR, Lawrence BA, Carlson NN et al. Perils of police action: a cautionary tale from US data sets. Inj Prev. 2017;23(1):27–32. [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
12. Feldman JM, Chen JT, Waterman PD, Krieger N. Temporal trends and racial/ethnic inequalities for legal intervention injuries treated in emergency departments: US men and women age 15–34, 2001–2014. J Urban Health. 2016;93(5):797–807. [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
13. Embrick DG. Two nations, revisited: the lynching of black and brown bodies, police brutality, and racial control in “post-racial” Amerikkka. Crit Sociol. 2015;41(6):835–843. [Google Scholar]
14. Geller A, Fagan J, Tyler T, Link BG. Aggressive policing and the mental health of young urban men. Am J Public Health. 2014;104(12):2321–2327. [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
15. Duru OK, Harawa NT, Kermah D, Norris KC. Allostatic load burden and racial disparities in mortality. J Natl Med Assoc. 2012;104(1–2):89–95. [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
16. Geronimus AT, Hicken M, Keene D, Bound J. “Weathering” and age patterns of allostatic load scores among Blacks and Whites in the United States. Am J Public Health. 2006;96(5):826–833. [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
17. Jee-Lyn García J, Sharif MZ. Black Lives Matter: a commentary on racism and public health. Am J Public Health. 2015;105(8):e27–e30. [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
18. Szanton SL, Thorpe RJ, Whitfield K. Life-course financial strain and health in African-Americans. Soc Sci Med. 2010;71(2):259–265. [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
19. Barber C, Azrael D, Cohen A et al. Homicides by police: comparing counts from the national violent death reporting system, vital statistics, and supplementary homicide reports. Am J Public Health. 2016;106(5):922–927. [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
20. Banks D, Couzens L, Planty M. Assessment of coverage in the arrest-related deaths program. 2015. Available at: https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/acardp.pdf. Accessed January 21, 2017.
21. Brunson RK. “Police don’t like Black people”: African-American young men’s accumulated police experiences. Criminol Public Policy. 2007;6(1):71–101. [Google Scholar]
22. Sewell AA, Jefferson KA. Collateral damage: the health effects of invasive police encounters in New York City. J Urban Health. 2016;93(suppl 1):42–67. [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
24. Hardeman RR, Medina EM, Kozhimannil KB. Structural racism and supporting Black lives—the role of health professionals. N Engl J Med. 2016;375(22):2113–2115. [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
25. Ford CL, Airhihenbuwa CO. Critical race theory, race equity, and public health: toward antiracism praxis. Am J Public Health. 2010;100(suppl 1):S30–S35. [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
