Police brutality is a risk factor for the manifestation of social inequities in the bodies and minds of individuals. Typically, we take the actions and inactions of police as a feature of social institutions that stand on their own. A political economic view of the individual, however, turns the gaze on how the social institution of policing works most effectively as both an intervention to and perpetuation of violent injuries against the individual and the community. This sociopolitical view of the injury-violence nexus provides a challenge to risk factor models that evaluate distal mechanisms of vulnerable health conditions to make explicit the source of injury against the body. A burgeoning body of research looks at the impact of police contact, violence, and brutality on a whole hose of outcomes across the life course, across social networks, and across social institutions.
My view of police violence looks down from the perch of the state to understand how the social ecology of the neighborhood and/or residential spaces — patterns an individual’s risk of vulnerable conditions. While most medical models of health situate illness as a personal flaw, problem, or challenge collected from your own behaviors and attitudes, my political economic model of health situates state-sanctioned violence as a sick system sedimenting ethnoracial, gendered, and sexual marginalization through a myriad inequitable pathways. I build nested datasets that connect the outcomes of police stops of pedestrians (and drivers) in a neighborhood to the illness risks of people living in those same neighborhoods.
These series of studies identify a greater risks of vulnerable conditions among people who reside in neighborhoods where police stops are more invasive and violent to people who use resources in those neighborhoods. The specific associations vary by the type of illness considered, as well as the ethnoracial and gender identities of neighborhood residents, the racial and economic composition of neighborhoods themselves, and the ethnoracial status of pedestrians. Administrative data on police stops from the New York City Police Department and the Philadelphia Police Department are leveraged alongside community health surveys in the same cities, nesting residents in neighborhoods defined by zipcodes, tracts, and larger community areas.
Empirical Studies on the Illness Risks of Police Violence, Stop-Question-and-Frisk, and Health Inequality
- Collateral Damage: The Health Effects of Invasive Police Encounters in New York City
- Living Under Surveillance: Gender, Psychological Distress, and Stop-Question-and-Frisk Policing in New York City
- The Illness Associations of Police Violence: Differential Relationships by Ethnoracial Composition
- Illness Spillovers of Lethal Police Violence: The Significance of Gendered Marginalization
- Negative Illness Feedbacks: High‐Frisk Policing Reduces Civilian Reliance on ED Services
Subject Matter Essays
- “Policing the Block: Pandemics, Systemic Racism, and the Blood of America” Pages 496-505 of Symposium on “COVID-19, Systematic Racism and Police Brutality” in City and Community, Volume 19, Issue 3 (September 2020)
- “All It Takes Is One Block: A Case Study of the History of Police Brutality in Public Health.” Chapter 38 in The Routledge History of Police Brutality in America
