Q: Why did ICE fail to get consent to remove a uterus? A: Chattel law.
Praise the lord for there is no informed consent when you are considered "alien child".
Q: What do Dana Wooten, Uterus, ICE & Detroit all have in common?
Let us start my Post Traumatic Fraud Disorder regression session to see what I can claim needs to be healed, and answer this in my findings, below.
Now, I have to stand back and take pause, for the simple fact that this document is dated Fall 2010, and this whistleblower seems to have been waiting for the proper moment to come out and report this in the media.
So, after taking a few moments to tilt my head to the right, I saw Detroit.
Yes, that is correct, this whistleblower letter to our federal immigration agencies, by a registered, licensed nurse, Dawn Wooten, waited all this time to not go through the formal reporting of fraud channels, to get picked up on the news wires, about something that may or may not have happened to unnamed women, of which we have no formal testimony, affidavit, video, relative, or any other human rights and/or christian organization to protest the lack of action in the performance of experimental medical procedures on wards of the state.
I did not see Detroit just because Bethany Christian has the trafficking tiny humans contracts with ICE in Foster Care and Adoption (actually, it is only adoption, but do not say anything or they might get busted filing false claims in Medicaid), but there was no mention that it would be the State of Texas who would have jurisdiction over the women and children.
It is just a Parental Rights legal thing.
Anyway, I decided to take a deep breath to see if I could disprove my prescient visions of Detroit, where, lo and behold, I could not.
I remember that U.S. Social Forum came to Detroit, where just about no one from Detroit showed up because all the "Elected Ones" were at the Michigan Democratic Convention, where they merged with the crowd to make it look like they had lots and lots of people in their movement to set up the big event.
The 2010 US Social Forum took place in Detroit, Michigan from the June 22–26[1] in the Northwest Goldberg area.[6] More than 20,000 people attended.[8] Detroit was chosen in part because of its activism in community building resulting from the lack of support from the Federal government of the United States. Organizers hoped that half of the 15,000 participants they had predicted would be from the Midwest.[9] Organizers planned on supporting and beautifying the neighborhood. Thousands of bicycles used during the forum were to be donated to the residents afterward. Some attendees bought vacant homes that were donated to a local organization after the Forum. The Detroit Liberation Library was created from hundreds of books collected from USSF participants from all over the country and later offered throughout the city.[10] Supporters of the Forum were encouraged to create Peoples Movement Assemblies in their own communities.[6] Activists at the gathering participated in more than 1,000 self-organized workshops.[11] One of the most well attended events was a conversation between Grace Lee Boggs and Immanuel Wallerstein.[8] Thousands of Social Forum participants marched to occupy Chase Bank Detroit headquarters, resulting in a national Chase Bank official speaking with church leaders in Detroit about foreclosures.[12] Progressive religious groups played a larger role in the 2010 US Social Forum than at the 2007 event.[13]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Social_Forum
The Northwest Goldberg area is not recognized by any official City of Detroit, Wayne County or State of Michigan or the United States as a legal, authority, and neither is the Detroit Land Bank Authority.
And, that, Boys & Girls is why I shall continue to stand back and take pause on this sensational, unsubstantiated claim that looks like Wooten slept in for the last few months, or decades, depending on when they came up with it (i.e. Fall 2010), because all I see is another #coloredrevolution psyoptic to cover up the trafficking of tiny humans, as we all know, started in Detroit.
But wait!
I must complete my Post Traumatic Fraud Disorder therapy by documenting that I know for a fact that Fat Ass used to be all up in this because I watched his Fat Ass, and I did not wait years, months nor decades to formally report his activities because I documented in real time that he, and all of his co-conspirators were being really uber mean to my Sweetie and if you do not believe me, you will just have to ask Rashida Tlaib to verify every single work I have just archived in the formal, public record, for decades.
The horrors are going to be with the children, because no one wants to talk about that, which is why we have the Institute for the Elimination of Poverty and Genocide cloaking the tale of Parental Rights.
This is also an attempt to cloak the origins of DACA and DAPA, for they are policy, and not law, just like ICPC, but no one cares for there are trillions involved in the industry of trafficking tiny humans in the name of god.
I shall assert that these hysterectomies may have been performed on those under the age of consent. I shall also aver that the reason why this "whistleblower" letter was presented in such a public fashion was because the Institute for the Elimination of Poverty and Genocide in not registered, nor incorporated, to possess any legal authority to represent the women who may or may not have been victim to such scientifically repugnant procedures.
Were these uterus sold for research or hosting of tiny humans?
Are they cloaking a drug in vitro ratline?
Could it be they were extracting teeny tiny humans for lab ratting?
Uterus transplantation (UTx) is now a possible approach for women with absolute uterine factor infertility to deliver a child, following the first successful delivery by Brännström et al. in Sweden in September 2014. This remarkable achievement attracted major attention worldwide and caused many countries to prepare for UTx, including countries in Asia. To date, three groups have performed UTx in humans in Asia, and many others are aiming for the clinical application of UTx with accumulation of basic experimental data. Therefore, it is likely that UTx will expand rapidly in Asia in the near future, although this will depend on ethical, social and religious views in each country. With this background, herein we summarize the current progress of UTx in East, Southeast and South Asia, with the purpose of increasing understanding of the current status of basic and clinical UTx research in each country and sharing progress and knowledge to ensure future development of UTx research in Asia.
The world will never know unless DHS Inspector General opens an investigation...or has he......?
Whistleblower Policy Marguerite Casey Foundation is committed to being an organization conducive to open discussion of our business practices. Our whistleblower policy applies to all Foundation employees, board members, and paid consultants. If you have reason to believe that this person has violated MCF’s policies or is in violation of a state or federal statute or regulation, you are encouraged to report your concerns by emailing whistleblower@caseygrants.org. Your email will be directed to the President & CEO, Board Chair, and the Foundation’s external ombudsperson. It is the Foundation’s policy to protect you from unlawful retaliation or discrimination by anyone affiliated with the Foundation as a result of your notifying either the Foundation when you have reason to believe the Foundation’s actions violate the law. The Foundation’s findings and actions will, to the extent possible, be communicated back to you. While the Foundation endeavors to maintain your confidentiality in the event you make such a report, your identity may have to be disclosed to conduct a thorough investigation, to comply with the law, or to provide accused individuals their legal rights to defense. This policy prevents you from being subject to retaliatory action by the Foundation or any of its staff members if you report information where you have a reasonable good faith belief that the information discloses: A violation of a state or federal statute; A violation of a state or federal rule or regulation; or With respect to employee safety or health, unsafe working conditions or work practices at the Foundation. The Foundation will not: Make, adopt, or enforce any rule, regulation, or policy preventing you from being a whistleblower; Retaliate against you as a whistleblower; Retaliate against you for refusing to participate in an activity that would result in a violation of a state or federal statute, or a violation or noncompliance with a state or federal rule or regulation; and Retaliate against you for having exercised your rights as a whistleblower in any former employment.
This is about modern day human trafficking because the USCCB needs these contracts and they already have the new resegregation trafficking tiny humans models
The #coloredrevolution just got kicked up a notch.
Washington, DC – Yesterday, in Ramos v. Wolf, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals vacated an existing preliminary injunction or pause of the Trump Administration’s attempt to terminate Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for over 200,000 individuals living legally in the United States. Archbishop José H. Gomez of Los Angeles, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), Bishop Mario E. Dorsonville, auxiliary bishop of Washington, chairman of the USCCB’s Committee on Migration, and Sean Callahan, president and CEO of Catholic Relief Services, issued the following statement: “The Ninth Circuit’s decision continues a heartbreaking path of uncertainty and fear for hundreds of thousands of TPS recipients needlessly put into motion by the Trump Administration. As detailed in our extensive work in Central America and the Caribbean, TPS countries such as El Salvador and Haiti cannot adequately handle the return of TPS recipients and their families. The spread of COVID-19 has only made conditions worse. Today's decision will fragment American families, leaving, for example, over 192,000 U.S. citizen children of Salvadoran TPS recipients without their parents and with uncertain futures. “Our nation must not turn its back on TPS recipients and their families; they too are children of God. We stand in solidarity with TPS recipients, who are here and have been living and working in the United States legally, and we will continue to do so with them in their countries of origin. “We renew our call for the U.S. Senate to take up the American Dream and Promise Act, which the House passed last year. We stand ready to support such efforts. Without action by Congress, however, recipients’ lives will be upended. Congress must act to ensure that such catastrophic human consequences do not occur.”
To learn more about Temporary Protected Status, please see the Justice for Immigrants website.
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.
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