close
Tuesday March 19, 2024

‘Police killings of US blacks exact mental health toll’

By AFP
June 23, 2018

PARIS: The disproportionately high rate at which unarmed black people die at the hands of police in the United States has a corrosive impact on the mental health of black Americans, researchers reported on Friday.

The frequency of these killings has been cited as symptomatic of deeply rooted racism, and is in any case perceived as such by most black Americans, they reported in The Lancet, a medical journal.

Audio or video evidence of such deaths over the last few years has given rise to the "Black Lives Matter" movement, whether in the form of street protests or National Football League players kneeling during the national anthem before games.

"We found that when police kill unarmed black Americans, there is mental health fallout that reverberates throughout the black American community," said senior author Alexander Tsai, an associate professor of psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School.

"This finding is significant because it shows that the effects of these killings go beyond immediate friends and family," he told AFP. Tallies kept by news organisations and researchers vary, but police have killed approximately 300 black Americans -- about a quarter of them unarmed -- each year since 2014.

Over this period, blacks were roughly three times more likely than whites to be killed by police, and nearly five times more likely to be killed by police while unarmed, the researchers said.

As of July 2017, 61 percent of the US population self-identified as "white", and 13 percent as "black", according to the US Census. Statistics show that black Americans have proportionally more encounters with law enforcement, which in itself increases the opportunity for violent outcomes.

A state investigation, for example, into policing practices in Ferguson, Missouri after the 2014 shooting death of an unarmed 18-year-old African American, Michael Brown, revealed that blacks were three-and-a-half times more likely than whites to be pulled over by police while driving. Black American stand-up comics have long highlighted the perils of "DWB", or "driving while black."