Prevalence, demographic variation and psychological correlates of exposure to police victimisation in four US cities

Taylor

SSM - Population Health

2018

Police maltreatment, whether experienced personally or indirectly through one’s family or friends, represents a potentially harmful stressor, particularly for minority populations. We address this issue by investigating: (1) how waist circumference (WC) varies by personal and vicarious exposure to unfair treatment by police (UTBP); and (2) to what extent exposure to UTBP explains the black-white disparity in WC. We employed data collected from a community-based sample of black (n = 601) and white (n = 608) adults living in Nashville-Davidson county Tennessee to address these questions. Results from our final linear regression model showed that those who reported vicarious UTBP had WCs that were approximately 2 in. greater than those who did not (b = 2.03; p = 0.003). While personal UTBP was not linked to higher WC, a post-hoc analysis suggested that our ability to detect an association was complicated by selection. Binary mediation analysis revealed that differential exposure to vicarious UTBP accounted for approximately 12% of the black-white WC disparity among women. We found no black-white differences in WC among men. The association between vicarious UTBP and WC did not vary by age, race, or gender. Overall, our findings point toward the role of discriminatory policing as a potential upstream contributor to racial disparities in health.

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 90%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Weighed down by discriminatory policing: Perceived unfair treatment and black-white disparities in waist circumference

Taylor

SSM - Population Health

2018

“…Although research on fatalities by police 4 has benefited from crowd-sourced attempts to comprehensively document these incidents, 5 awareness of nonfatal incidents is dependent on self-reported data from civilians, which has only recently been systematically collected. 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 Among these efforts, few studies have assessed the association of mental health with nonfatal police violence exposures. This assessment is needed to develop comprehensive public health interventions aimed at preventing police violence and its mental health consequences.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Association of Exposure to Police Violence With Prevalence of Mental Health Symptoms Among Urban Residents in the United States

et al. 2018

Behavioral Sci & The Law

“…An established social science literature has documented the psychological consequences (e.g. emotional and psychological harms, negative emotional freight, adverse mental health effects, trauma, overall anxiety) of involuntary police stops (see, e.g., DeVylder et al, ; Geller, Fagan, Tyler, & Link, ; Sewell, Jefferson, & Lee, ; Tyler, Fagan, & Geller, ).…”

Section: The Underexplored Part Of the Terry Equation: The Psychologimentioning

confidence: 99%

“…14 In a study by DeVylder et al, the World Health Organization's four domains of violence (physical violence, sexual violence, psychological violence, andneglect) were used as measures to assess the type of police victimization experienced by study participants. Of the four types of violence, psychological violence (e.g., threatening, intimidating, stopping without cause, or using discriminatory slurs) was the one most anecdotally prevalent in Terry stops, and was reported overwhelmingly by the young, minority, male, and transgender individuals who are disproportionately subjected to it(DeVylder et al, 2017).15 This study was not limited to the effects of Terry stops and frisks. It included full body searches and strip searches, which exceed the bounds of permissible conduct under Terry (though a consensual encounter or Terry stop may escalate into a full body search or a strip search: see, e.g., Mendenhall v. United States(, 1980), in which a consensual search rapidly escalated into an invasive strip search).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

The mismeasure ofTerrystops: Assessing the psychological and emotional harms of stop and frisk to individuals and communities

Bandes

Pryor

Kerrison

et al. 2019

In Terry v. Ohio, the US Supreme Court relied on a balancing test to uphold the reasonableness of the practice known as “stop and frisk,” balancing the contribution of the practice to effective crime prevention and detection against the nature and quality of the intrusion to individual rights. In recent years, statistics have been powerfully deployed by legal scholars, jurists, and policymakers to challenge the assumption that stop and frisk leads to frequent discovery of contraband or other criminal behavior, and to address stark racial and ethnic disparities in the deployment of stop and frisk. However, the other side of the Terry equation—the nature and quality of the intrusion—has received far less attention from the legal community. With few exceptions, Terry jurisprudence portrays the Terry frisk simply as a brief pat‐down of the outer clothing and treats each Terry stop as an isolated encounter for purposes of measuring the harm involved. Yet there is a robust social science literature on the effects of stop and frisk on individuals, including data on its effects on individuals from marginalized or vulnerable groups, on individuals over time, and on communities as a whole. Moreover, stop and frisk in the current era has evolved from a tool in the arsenal of individual officers to a systematic, widely deployed strategy. This article argues that the failure to grapple with the application of modern knowledge to modern policing practices leads to a mismeasurement on both sides of the Terry equation. Not only does stop and frisk cause a wide range of emotional and psychological harms; these harms may also interfere with the ability of law enforcement to prevent and investigate crime. Even apart from any legal doctrinal implications for stop and frisk jurisprudence, recognizing the flawed assumptions described in this article should encourage all the relevant stakeholders to re‐evaluate the consequences of the Terry regime.