On June 6, 2020, protesters in Dallas, Texas, rally against police violence. (by Matthew T Rader, MatthewTRader.com, License CC-BY-SA)
Since the end of May, scholars, doctors, and medical organizations have made public statements condemning police violence as a public health problem. On May 29, American Medical Association President Patrice Harris and Board Chair Jesse Ehrenfeld claimed that police violence “significantly drives unnecessary and costly injury, and premature morbidity and death.” Two days later, the American Academy of Pediatrics tweeted “Racism is a public health issue.” Some have even called police violence a pandemic.
Why are doctors and scholars making these statements? Their motives are clearly good. Discussion of police violence should not take a backseat to discussions of COVID-19, and Black people are disproportionately harmed by both. This correlation points to a common cause: structural racism. Still, framing police violence the same way we frame issues like smoking cigarettes or wearing a seatbelt is misleading. It misdirects our attention, confuses the conversation, and obscures effective policies.
Calling police violence a public health problem is a strategic choice. It locates violence as part of structural racism. It’s supposed to focus our attention away from questions about whether an officer used an appropriate amount of force, whether cops are racist, and whether the problem of police violence stems from “a few bad apples.” Saying police violence is a pandemic, like COVID-19, highlights the fact that police violence shortens lifespans and costs money and medical resources. And it brings attention to less obvious ways police violence affects health, too, like causing chronic stress and mental trauma. It’s especially striking to call police violence a public health problem now. We’re already living through COVID-19, a crisis that affects Black people disproportionately. But police violence is so harmful to Black people and communities that protesters are in the nation’s streets anyway.
However, calling police violence a public health problem is a bad strategic choice. In a statement, Bonnie Castillo, head of National Nurses United, said that the George Floyd protests follow years of inaction and failure to work for “transformative change to policing practices.” But whose inaction? Whose failure? The same group of nonprofits and professional organizations calling for increased accountability, implicit bias training, and interracial dialogues have been saying the same things for years. And their recommendations influence nonprofit police-reform campaigns. For example, the #8CANTWAIT campaign amplified by celebrities like Oprah Winfrey and Ariana Grande directly cites some of the public health experts linked earlier in this article as the basis for their eight reform policies.
The Minneapolis police department is a great case study. Measures to hold police accountable, increase transparency, and reduce implicit bias have been tried. The department implemented policies such as prioritizing de-escalation of conflicts, requiring officers to wear body cameras, and training officers in implicit bias reduction years before George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis officer Derek Chauvin. Campaign Zero, the reform initiative that emerged from the Ferguson, Missouri, protests over the police killing of Michael Brown, lists Buffalo, New York, as a city with a police department that can keep the public safe without killing people. Buffalo is the same city where video of police officers went viral after they pushed an elderly protester over, cracking his skull on the pavement. After those officers were fired, the entire Buffalo Emergency Response Team resigned in support of them.
Even reformed police departments are filled with officers guilty of doing bad things. Montages of police violence are being shared widely, along with videos and photos of cops beating and gassing peaceful protesters, children, press, and the elderly, while destroying medical supplies and even slashing tires. These videos shouldn’t be needed to motivate people, and we have long known about the trauma inflicted on Black communities by viral videos of police shootings. But videos of police brutality are making people angry and driving them to action. After police violence against protestors in cities like Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., protests in those cities got bigger. What’s even more interesting is that no one group is leading these protests across the country. Many different organizers and communities are coming together spontaneously, creating a huge mosaic of resistance and getting results. Initiatives like the #8CANTWAIT campaign are being widely shared on social media but are they energizing protestors? Are they enacting real change?
Police violence is a systemic issue. Racism is a systemic issue. Focusing on the system is safe, from a political perspective. When we talk about police violence in jargony public health terms—“social determinants of health,” “inequity,” “data-driven,” and “evidence-based,” to name a few—we abstract away from the physical and mental violence inflicted on communities. Sterilizing the way we talk about shootings, chokeholds, riot gear, and knees-to-the-neck makes them easier to discuss in respectable venues like academic journals and Washington Post columns. It also has the benefit of making white people less uncomfortable. This strategy avoids the anger of the public, activists, or police unions, sidestepping contentious arguments about particular uses of force or shootings. Using public health language allows us to stop short of saying “our public officials have failed us.” But it also disservices the people and communities affected by police violence. What happened to George Floyd wasn’t an “inequity in police use-of-force policy” or an “adverse health outcome.” It was a murder. We need to say that sort of thing clearly, unequivocally, and without hesitation now more than ever. Anger over police violence is why people are in the streets now. People don’t care about more implicit-bias training or increased police transparency. They want the cops to stop killing Black people.
Doctors and scholars condemning police violence as a public health problem want to improve the length and quality of Black lives, just like everyone else involved in the movement for Black lives. But using the language of public health researchers and their understanding of the problem is demotivating. And their solutions just don’t work. Even when police reform campaigns have their proposals enacted, police brutality and abuse persist; chokeholds, for instance, had been banned in New York City for 21 years when a police officer killed Eric Garner using one in 2014. As we think more seriously about the future of the police—whether to reform departments or defund them—we need to think about new solutions to stopping police violence. We need to talk about police violence in clear, explicit language without dodging difficult questions, such as whether police are racist. The way forward is through a people-powered movement, not one led by well-intentioned nonprofits.
Madeline Ward
Madeline Ward is a PhD candidate in philosophy at Georgetown University and works on topics in feminist epistemology, bioethics, and social justice. You can read more of her work at www.madelineward.com.
