In 2018, the American Public Health Association (APHA) adopted a policy statement recognizing law enforcement violence as a public health issue. The statement was informed, in part, by a public health literature that documents consistent associations between law enforcement violence and adverse health outcomes, including physical health (e.g., injury), mental health (e.g., posttraumatic stress disorder), and death. This literature also finds inequitable distributions of law enforcement violence that disproportionately target Black, Latinx, and Native American communities; immigrants; people who identify as transgender; people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or queer; those experiencing houselessness; low-income individuals; sex workers; and people who use drugs.1 Rooted in an understanding of how structural racism and institutional oppression shape population patterns of law enforcement violence, the statement proposes a public health alternative for ensuring public safety and well-being. For this editorial, we examined the extent to which the statement’s recommendations have been implemented. A summary of our findings, including illustrative examples as well as further opportunities to leverage the statement in support of upstream, public health approaches to intervening on law enforcement violence, follows...
Language: en
", language="en", issn="0090-0036", doi="10.2105/AJPH.2019.305447", url="http://dx.doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2019.305447" }