Fatal police shootings of unarmed Blacks measurably harm community mental health

Evidence

Using a population-based, quasi-experimental study design, Bor, Venkataramani, Williams, and Tsai (2018) examined the causal impact of fatal police shootings of unarmed Blacks on the mental health of Black Americans. On average, participants were exposed to one fatal police shooting of an unarmed Black person in a three-month window. Every additional fatal shooting was associated with 0.14 poor mental health days among Black Americans in the general population of the state where the shooting occurred. Applying these estimates on a broader scale implies that fatal police shootings of unarmed Black people could contribute 1.7 additional poor mental health days per person per year, or, on the scale of the entire U.S. population, 55 million additional poor mental health days among African American adults. Thus, the effects of police decision-making in specific encounters can spill over to impact the wider population. Importantly, there was no impact of these shootings of unarmed Blacks on the mental health of White Americans living in the same states, and there was no demonstrable effect of police shootings of armed Blacks on the mental health of African Americans. Thus, the negative effects are tied specifically to “the meaning ascribed to police killings of unarmed black Americans, in light of the historical and institutional context in which they occur” (Bor et al., 2018, p. 308). — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law, 381

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to reader’s project on whether collective harm responses require shared meaning and interpretation rather than mere event exposure - the differential response by race and by victim-armed-status is evidence that perceived injustice, not event itself, drives the effect.
• DEEPTHINKING: The finding that identical shootings affect only the group that reads them as meaningful injustice - and only when the victim was unarmed - shows harm tracks constructed meaning, not raw event.
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law: A Definitive Look at…, 381