Session: Police Violence: An American Public Health Issue (Society for Social Work and Research 22nd Annual Conference - Achieving Equal Opportunity, Equity, and Justice)

The past few years have steadily punctuated by media reports of police killing or injuring civilians in the United States. This is likely not a new problem, but rather a problem that has gained public attention with the advent of smartphone technology and easily accessible real-time video footage. However, the resulting national discourse over the nature of policing in the U.S. has been largely uninformed by empirical data. Only a handful of studies have examined police violence from a public health perspective, finding that it has a broad range correlates and effects ranging from anxiety to death. Further, these correlates are inequitably distributed in the population, as is police violence, both of which are more likely to fall upon racial/ethnic minorities, sexual minorities, and young males. As such, the American Public Health Association recently issued a statement calling for increased recognition of police violence as a public health issue, greater empirical research on this topic, and progressive policy change to address the problem. This symposium brings together three social work researchers, and their co-authors, who are tackling the problem of police violence from distinct but converging angles. The first talk provides an overview of the Survey of Police-Public Encounters, a recent attempt to quantify police violence in the U.S. and to examine its impact on civilian mental health. This talk will present two novel measures of police violence, resultant prevalence data on multiple domains of police violence and neglect, and cross-sectional correlations between police violence exposure and various mental health outcomes. The second talk addresses the risk of police violence among women. While less likely to be exposed to police violence than men, a notable minority of women nonetheless do report significant incidents of police violence, particularly women who have a history of other forms of victimization such as exposure to sexual or intimate partner violence. The third talk presents an analysis of the National Survey of American Life, a national sample of African-American households, in order to assess the mental health correlates of police violence in a large national sample. A renowned researcher on the trauma of community violence will provide commentary on the three studies as discussant. These studies provide an overview of the currently salient yet under-researched problem of police violence in the United States. Together they address factors that increase risk for exposure to victimization itself and, subsequently, risk for mental health issues deriving from such exposure. This issue is of critical importance to social workers in the criminal justice or behavioral health fields, and of significant interest in the context of the current national discourse on the risks and benefits of police power.