Police Killings and Their Spillover Effects on the Mental Health of Black Americans: A Population-Based, Quasi-Experimental Study

From 2010-2014, Black Americans were nearly three times more likely than white Americans to be killed by police—accounting for more than 40 percent of victims of all police killings nationwide—and five times more likely than white Americans to be killed unarmed. Beyond the immediate consequences for victims and their families, police killings can also affect the mental health of people not directly connected to the killings or to the people involved. 

Descriptive studies suggest an elevated prevalence of depression and post-traumatic stress disorder among Black Americans living in communities where specific police killings of unarmed Black Americans have occurred. Anecdotal evidence from traditional and social media suggests adverse mental health impacts in the wake of these events. However, the population-level health impacts of police killings have not been quantified in nationally representative data.

In a new journal article published in The Lancet, Jacob Bor and colleagues combined novel data on police killings with individual-level data from the nationally representative 2013–2015 United States Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) to estimate the causal impact of police killings of unarmed Black Americans on the 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 three 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.”

Main findings:

• 49 percent of Black American respondents were exposed to one or more police killings of unarmed Black Americans in their state of residence in the three months prior to the survey. 
• Exposure to one or more police killings was associated with a 0.35 day increase in poor mental health days. 
• Each additional police killing of an unarmed Black American in the respondent’s state of residence in the three months prior to the interview was associated with a 0.14 day increase in the number of poor mental health days.

The findings suggest that police killings of unarmed Black Americans have a meaningful population-level impact on the mental health of Black Americans. The findings also bolster calls to measure police killings and provide an additional public health rationale to better understand and address the potential effects of police killings of unarmed Black Americans and other manifestations of structural racism in the US more accurately.