Police killings of unarmed black Americans: a reassessment of community mental health spillover effects

ABSTRACT

We reevaluate the claim from Bor et al. (2018: 302) that ‘police killings of unarmed black Americans have effects on mental health among black American adults in the general population.’ The Mapping Police Violence data used by the authors include 91 incidents involving black decedents who were either (1) not killed by police officers in the line of duty or (2) armed when killed. These incidents should have been removed or recoded prior to analysis. Correctly recoding these incidents decreased in magnitude all of the reported coefficients, and, more importantly, eliminated the reported statistically significant effect of exposure to police killings of unarmed black individuals on the mental health of black Americans in the general population. We caution researchers to vet carefully crowdsourced data that tracks police behaviors and warn against reducing these complex incidents to overly simplistic armed/unarmed dichotomies.

KEYWORDS:

• Deadly force
• mental health
• data validity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. See https://plu.mx/plum/a/?doi=10.1016/S0140-6736(18)31130-9.

2. See https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/aboutthedata.

3. Eventually, Bor et al. (2020, p. 6) responded to the analyses we present in this paper by estimating 128 regression models ‘reflecting all of the different exposure terms constructed from all combinations of omissions of the 7 categories of cases’ that we dispute here. All point estimates were positive, though notably, 39% were statistically non-significant. More important, their approach implies that all 128 combinations had construct validity. Many did not, as we discuss below.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Justin Nix

Justin Nix is an associate professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Nebraska Omaha. His research centers on policing with emphases on procedural justice, legitimacy, and officer-involved shootings.

M. James Lozada is an assistant professor of Obstetric Anesthesiology at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Previously a TV news reporter for 6 years, he now combines his expertise in medicine and media to help improve patient experience.