Police killings and their spillover effects on the mental health of black Americans: a population-based, quasi-experimental study

Publication date: Available online 21 June 2018Source: The LancetAuthor(s): Jacob Bor, Atheendar S Venkataramani, David R Williams, Alexander C TsaiSummaryBackgroundPolice kill more than 300 black Americans—at least a quarter of them unarmed—each year in the USA. These events might have spillover effects on the mental health of people not directly affected.MethodsIn this population-based, quasi-experimental study, we combined novel data on police killings with individual-level data from the nationally representative 2013–15 US Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) to estimate the causal impact of police killings of unarmed black Americans on self-reported mental health of other black American adults in the US general population. The primary exposure was the number of police killings of unarmed black Americans occurring in the 3 months prior to the BRFSS interview within the same state. The primary outcome was the number of days in the previous month in which the respondent's mental health was reported as “not good”. We estimated difference-in-differences regression models—adjusting for state-month, month-year, and interview-day fixed effects, as well as age, sex, and educational attainment. We additionally assessed the timing of effects, the specificity of the effects to black Americans, and the robustness of our findings.Findings38 993 (weighted sample share 49%) of 103 710 black American respondents were exposed to one or more police killings of...
Source: The Lancet - Category: General Medicine Source Type: research