There has always been cyberchatter which questions Clarence Thomas' legal acumen, which is why I believe he is popping up to lead the charge of challenging the doctrine of Stare Decisis.
Perhaps, that is why he was never very vocal in oral arguments.
But, hey, what do I know?
I know there is a very long history on very questionable rulings when it comes to foreign influence in elections and trafficking tiny humans, like the doctrine of Partus Sequitur Ventrem.
I also know he is open to revisit stare decisiswhich is a good thing, considering lots of those precedent decisions were made during the "Pre-Emancipation Proclamation Era".
Notice how this video intentionally fails to address the Partus Doctrine.
Heck, there is court precedence going back to Three-Fifths Clause Days, right back to that Partus Doctrine that no one seems to want to talk about.
DeShaney v. Winnebagomade it perfectly clear that children have absolutely no civil rights, where this doctrine is even more solidified if that child hails from the population of "The Poors", the socioeconomic status of the mother.
Homer Plessey Partus Doctrine ruled he had
no right of association under the
First Amendment because of the
"One-drop rule".
Plessey v. Fergusonis not even recognized as a First Amendment argument of right of association, which means the entire Brown v. Board of Educationneeds to be revisited, in full, to correct the basis of the decision, because it never addresses the residuals of the peculiar institution of chattel law, like the Partus Doctine.
How can SCOTUS make rulings on race when it is using the "One Drop Rule" of the Partus Doctrine, which was made before CRISPR?
I am not alleging any of SCOTUS rulings were compromised for the simple fact that there is no grievance procedure, or rather due process of the petitioners, as that part of U.S. history was intentionally omitted when there exists no federal grievance procedure.
How can SCOTUS continue to promulgate the Stare Decisis Doctrine made under the Partus Doctrine?
Because the SCOTUS and federal justices can do what they want, when they want, including the perpetuating the residuals of the peculiar institution.
As you watch, or may not watch, this hearing, the discussions, using their hand picked American University groomed spokestokens, focus on how they are going to hole the Justices accountable.
I say have a public forum, like they used to do, where the public can put out their dirt.
Many of the witnesses were against the personal lives of the Justices made public and had no clue of how to told them accountable.
I say we just use that Justinian Code, the internet, and proceed with the reconstruction of justice in blockchain technologies, to preserve the annals of history, no matter what is uncloaked in the trafficking of tiny humans.
(Reuters) - Justice Clarence Thomas on Monday urged the U.S. Supreme Court to feel less bound to upholding precedent, advancing a view that if adopted by enough of his fellow justices could result in more past decisions being overruled, perhaps including the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion nationwide.
Writing in a gun possession case over whether the federal government and states can prosecute someone separately for the same crime, Thomas said the court should reconsider its standard for reviewing precedents.
Thomas said the nine justices should not uphold precedents that are “demonstrably erroneous,” regardless of whether other factors supported letting them stand.
“When faced with a demonstrably erroneous precedent, my rule is simple: We should not follow it,” wrote Thomas, who has long expressed a greater willingness than his colleagues to overrule precedents.
In a concurring opinion, which no other justice joined, Thomas referred to the court’s 1992 decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which reaffirmed Roe and said states cannot place an undue burden on the constitutional right to an abortion recognized in the Roe decision. Thomas, a member of the court at the time, dissented from the Casey ruling.
Thomas, 70, joined the court in 1991 as an appointee of Republican President George H.W. Bush. Thomas is its longest-serving current justice.
The court now has a 5-4 conservative majority, and Thomas is among its most conservative justices.
He demonstrated his willingness to abandon precedent in February when he wrote that the court should reconsider its landmark 1964 New York Times v. Sullivan ruling that made it harder for public officials to win libel lawsuits.
“Thomas says legal questions have objectively correct answers, and judges should find them regardless of whether their colleagues or predecessors found different answers,” said Jonathan Entin, a law professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. “Everyone is concerned about this because they’re thinking about Roe v. Wade.”
COURT DIVISIONS
The Thomas opinion focused on “stare decisis,” a Latin term referring to the legal principle that U.S. courts should not overturn precedents without a special reason.
While stare decisis (pronounced STAR-ay deh-SY-sis) has no formal parameters, justices deciding whether to uphold precedents often look at such factors as whether they work, enhance stability in the law, are part of the national fabric or promote reliance interests, such as in contract cases.
In 2000, conservative then-Chief Justice William Rehnquist left intact the landmark 1966 Miranda v. Arizona ruling, which required police to advise people in custody of their rights, including the rights to remain silent and have a lawyer.
Writing for a 7-2 majority, Rehnquist wrote that regardless of concerns about Miranda’s reasoning, “the principles of stare decisis weigh heavily against overruling it now.” Thomas joined Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissent from that decision. But even Scalia, a conservative who died in 2016, had a different view of stare decisis.
In a widely quoted comment, Scalia once told a Thomas biographer, Ken Foskett, that Thomas “doesn’t believe in stare decisis, period,” and that “if a constitutional line of authority is wrong, he would say let’s get it right. I wouldn’t do that.”
Stare decisis has also split the current court, including last month when in a 5-4 decision written by Thomas the justices overruled a 1979 precedent that had allowed states to be sued by private parties in courts of other states.
Justice Stephen Breyer, a member of the court’s liberal wing, dissented, faulting the majority for overruling “a well-reasoned decision that has caused no serious practical problems.” Citing the 1992 Casey ruling, Breyer said the May decision “can only cause one to wonder which cases the Court will overrule next.”
Thomas said the court should “restore” its jurisprudence relating to precedents to ensure it exercises “mere judgment” and focuses on the “correct, original meaning” of laws it interprets.
“In our constitutional structure, our rule of upholding the law’s original meaning is reason enough to correct course,” Thomas wrote.
Thomas also said demonstrably erroneous decisions should not be “elevated” over federal statutes, as well as the Constitution, merely because they are precedents.
“That’s very different from what the Court does today,” said John McGinnis, a law professor at Northwestern University in Chicago.
McGinnis said the thrust of Thomas’s opinion “makes clear that in a narrow area he will give some weight to precedent. But at the same time, he thinks cases have one right answer, and might find more cases ‘demonstrably erroneous.’”
So, having properly identified a child welfare propaganda model, because I figured out the reason no one wanted to touch this tar baby with a ten foot pole is because, if they did actually "study" the issues identified in H.R. 40, they would find out it was child welfare.
I smelled a distraction campaign that financially rallied groups to beat that afrocentric drum to distract everyone while they were stealin'.
I got saddy face, so I reworte H.R. 40.1 for my Sweetie's birthday.
It called for reparations for the entire world by using the data already out there, so you do not have to waste the 8 million dollars that was traditionally contained in the Bill, to tell the truth.
The truth is it is child welfare and now, instead of a melanin content based model utilizing such sophisticated tools as the "brown-paper bag test" or those available heuristics that have been inserted and preserved in our Plessey v. Ferguson culture of "separate yet equal" of group association assignment, we now use intelligence to maximize revenues for one, in the best interests of the child, to "reach their fullest potential" through databases.
I was dismissed, really badly, I mean, I met with the most horrible verbal accosting, up in D.C. and in Detroit.
I thought the reasons my tires got slashed one time was because the spears chucked at me missed.
They were stealing my Sweetie's legacy.
I got really, really bad saddy face, so I preserved it in the annals of history because you cannot, no matter how hard you try, wipe the cyber universe of John Conyers, Jr.
HA. HA. HA.
Ok, now that the digressive story of preserving the institution of my Sweetie's legacy is done, because I SEO'd all over the place, for over a decade now, let us get back to how the Meanies attempted to highjack it.
I ran across this "promulgation of the checks" article and was deeply moved by the passionate case for Southern Reparations Loan Fund and froze as I read it.
2. A policy to compensate an oppressed people for historic wrongs
“For two centuries the Negro was enslaved, and robbed of any wages—potential accrued wealth which would have been the legacy of his descendants.” —Martin Luther King Jr., in a 1965
Playboy interview with Alex Haley
Who are reparations for?
Many U.S. acts of violence have spurred calls for reparations, from the colonization of the Americas to the invasion of Iraq. In 1988, the U.S. government gave Japanese-American survivors of World War II internment camps a check for $20,000 each. But here we’ll focus on Black Americans, for whom reparations are most often discussed, for centuries of enslavement, Jim Crow, segregation, redlining and mass incarceration, among other wrongs.
So would all Black Americans just get a check?
Maybe. But many leading reparations scholars think the process should be more complex. Duke professor William A. Darity Jr., for instance, points out that, given most businesses are white-owned, the checks may just further increase wealth disparities. He thinks reparations money could instead fund institution building that supports “economic improvement within the black community.” The Southern Reparations Loan Fund (SRLF) puts that theory into practice by investing in cooperative businesses owned by Black and other marginalized groups.
The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) platform has a broader vision: free college for all, a guaranteed minimum income for Black people, comprehensive Black history in school curricula and more. Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Khan-Cullors is fond of saying any reparations package should also include a therapist.
But, c'mon, America's way too racist for this, right?
Well, yes, there’s been some foot-dragging. Former U.S. Rep. John Conyers Jr. introduced a bill each year for almost 30 years simply calling for a commission to look into the idea. It’s never reached a vote. In the meantime, SRLF and other groups are moving forward on a smaller scale. Many of M4BL’s proposals require only local or state action.
On the Left, some reparations skeptics believe a race-blind economic platform can best boost the poor of all races. Many reparations advocates support a similar plan, and some of their demands (e.g., free college) would help everyone. But many also believe the playing field cannot be leveled—and the past cannot be reconciled— without addressing the specific harms to Black communities. “What I’m talking about is more than recompense,” wrote Ta-Nehisi Coates in his blockbuster 2014 Atlantic piece on reparations. “What is needed is a healing of the American psyche.”
This article traumatized me because I smelled the stench of TARP. The article was ripe with NGOs, United Nations, forced migration, Social Impact Bonds, was mean and inferred a lie upon my Sweetie, and introduce complex finance fraud schemes found only in TARP. So, I decided to disprove the transposable model I am far to familiar from identifying because, in this instance, the Meanies just co-opted the reparations issue and juxtaposed the child abuse propaganda model. "Give us money to help this targeted population so we can prop up some more community strawman leaders in positions of political and social prominence to pilfer the coffers of the Social Security Trust Fund and run some complex financial fraud schemes in stealin land." They do this all the time and it started in Detroit. I was right there and so is the DOJ.
SosId: 1486931
Status: Current-Active
Citizenship: Domestic
Date Formed: 12/16/2015
Registered Agent: Whitfield, Edward L.
Behold, not only did I fail to disprove that this is not Reparations Propaganda, but I found myself another one of those complex financial fraud schemes, but this one also dealt with, or I should properly state my disclaimer that I have yet to get any verification on this one, another election fraud operation through databases.
Ed Whitfield is a social critic, writer and community activist who has lived in Greensboro since 1970. He is co-Managing Director of the Fund for Democratic Communities. Originally from Little Rock, Arkansas, Ed’s political activism started with attending Little Rock Central High School and beginning to do anti-war work as a teenager. Ed retired after 30 years in industry before becoming involved with philanthropy. He now speaks and writes on issues of cooperatives and economic development while continuing to be interested in issues of war and peace, as well as education and social responses to racism. Ed serves on the boards of the New Economy Coalition, The Working World, and the Southern Reparations Loan Fund. While he spends much of his time practicing bass guitar, Ed can often be found playing jazz or blues flute along with singer-songwriters and bands in Greensboro and wherever he goes in the world. He recently won the “Plays the Most Instruments” award at Greensboro’s long-running Open Mic night.
The Fund for Democratic Communities is running under....hold on a second, I need a breather....
Of course, I am just saying, without any certainty at this time, that major stakeholders in Awan Working World, Inc., is in partnership with the Meanies, who were really, really mean to me, but even more meaner-er to my Sweetie, when it came to reparations propaganda, but I am going to wait for the OIG DOJ to broach this allegation because it is a Detroit issue.
Then, I discovered an entire industry for extractive financing to manipulate elections, with group rally and issue advocacy.
Brian is the former Executive Director of the Austin Cooperative Business Association (ACBA), a regional cross-sector trade association for cooperatives. From 2005-2013 Brian managed the Univ. of Texas Inter-Cooperative Council, a student housing cooperative. Brian serveSd on the board of NASCO Development Services for 8 years and the NASCO Board for two years. Presently he is Co-Director of The Cooperation Group, a non-profit cooperative development organization based in Detroit, Michigan. Before working in co-ops Brian worked for Apple as the manager of the Inside Sales team serving educational institutions. He also has experience working in politics in Texas including managing campaigns and organizing for ethics reform at the state level and for cooperatives at the local level. Brian recently assisted the Austin City Council in passing a resolution supporting cooperatives including $60,000 for starting and expanding the local cooperative economy. He is currently a trustee of a revolving loan fund supporting housing cooperatives: the Kagawa Student Cooperative Reinvestment Fund at Shared Capital Cooperative.
The Cooperation Group is a Michigan not-for-profit corporation and 501c3 charity. Special thanks to Joint Cities Development Corporation for allowing us to operate under their fiscal sponsorship until we received tax exempt status from the IRS.
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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