Can the Stress of Biased Policing Cause Physical Disability?
Internalized structural trauma can cause an acute level of psychosomatic stress
Note: Psychology Today cross-published a version of this essay, and promoted it as an essential read under ‘Stress’ and ‘Race and Ethnicity.’ The author used credible and authoritative sources of investigative journalism to verify each statement, as indicated by hyperlinks. Additionally, freedom of press extends to freelance journalists as much as staff journalists. And, for all U.S. citizens, critiquing elected or appointed officials — as well as government policies and practices — is a constitutionally-protected form of civic engagement.
Key Points:
- The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has declared structural racism a threat to public health.
- Psychosomatic illness borne from racial trauma drives disparities in physical health and life expectancy.
- Racial stress correlates with autoimmune, cardiac, endocrine, neurological, and reproductive disorders.
An Undeniable Institutional Pattern
Up to half of individuals killed by police have a disability, according to the Ruderman Family Foundation. Sandra Bland, 28, had epilepsy; Eric Garner, 43, had asthma, diabetes, and a heart condition; and Freddie Gray, 25, had a developmental disability from lead exposure.
The 2019 murder of Osaze Osagie, a 29-year-old Black man who lived with Asperger syndrome and schizophrenia, is another example. Officer M. Jordan Pieniazek fatally shot him while serving a mental health warrant.
District attorney Bernie Cantorna cleared all three officers involved of charges and justified the shooting, announcing at a press conference, “Officers are trained to shoot and shoot until the attack stops.”
In a public response, Osaze family attorneys conveyed that Cantorna’s decision “opens a new wound for the Osagie family, who will forever regret reaching out to the police to seek emergency help for their son.” State College’s NAACP called for Cantorna’s resignation.
After Osaze’s parents filed a federal lawsuit, Cantorna referred the case to Pennsylvania State Police and their Bureau of Criminal Investigation. The credibility of that investigation is questionable, at best.
State Police Sgt. William Slaton, who is Black and a commander within the Equity and Inclusion Office, “emphatically said race played no role in the shooting,” according to Centre Daily Times.
“You can’t associate every incident just because it has a white versus a black person with every type of hateful incident in America,” Sgt. Slaton told the crowd at a vigil for Osaze.
From 2016 to 2019, Pennsylvania State Police faced 32 complaints of racial profiling.
And a recent investigation revealed that PA State Police conducts optional searches on Black and Latinx drivers disproportionately. Upon receiving public requests for this data back in 2019, PA State Police initially ceased collecting it altogether.
Concealment of the data is disconcerting, considering that police are 3.6 times more likely to use excessive force against Black people. And the lack of transparency is worrisome, given how well-funded PA State Police is.
In 2021, The Pennsylvania State University paid PA State Police $1.9 million for football security, and Penn State still owes tens of thousands to 70 state police officers who provided security during a Proud Boys event last year.
Within the University, campus police continues delaying release of use-of-force data disaggregated by race, as of January 2023.
An Unaccountable Political Climate
While community members have argued racial bias played a role in Osaze’s murder — “a public accusation,” according to Assistant Police Chief Matthew Wilson — an internal investigation chaired by Capt. Chris Fishel found no prior complaints concerning bias or illegitimate use of force.
State College’s Borough Council commissioned the International Association of Chiefs of Police to investigate further. Four years later, the State College Police Department has implemented only 36 of the 47 recommended remediations.
Reform has focused mainly on crisis intervention training (CIT), which police Chief John Gardner lauded as “the gold standard for law enforcement response to serving mental health warrants.”
The training is indeed a step forward but still does not compel officers to examine implicit biases stemming from ableism and anti-Blackness.
In 2014, The Washington Post launched its Police Shooting Database, after police in Ferguson, Missouri murdered Michael Brown, 24 — before then, such specific data was inaccessible to the public.
We now know that U.S. police murder roughly 1,000 people per year — the highest rate among “developed” nations — and Black Americans constitute at least 27% victims, despite comprising only 12.4% of the U.S. population.
What’s more, only 91 officers were arrested for murder or manslaughter in connection with the 6,300 police police murders from 2015 to 2020.
Translation: Little more than 1% have faced charges.
And over half of police killings go unreported.
The 2020 global protests organized around the back-to-back police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor championed police reform and resulted in the emergence of community oversight boards, which, in theory, are designed for citizens to hold police accountable for misconduct.
In actuality, though, many of these boards — like the one State College’s Borough Council established in the aftermath of Osaze’s murder — have no authority to act on their civilian complaint processes by disciplining officers.
“We’re not going to be able to investigate. And we’re not going to be able to make the State College PD do anything,” the board chair told Spotlight PA.
In Tioga, PA — a town of 606 not even 100 miles north of State College — the cop who killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice was sworn in by the mayor in 2022, as the town’s sole police officer.
An Unspoken Public Health Crisis
The aforementioned injustices not only psychologically traumatize Black Americans; they arguably shorten the average life expectancy for Black Americans directly or vicariously traumatized.
In other words, it is likely, not coincidental that Black Americans have the second-lowest life expectancy after Native peoples, while also experiencing the highest rate of biased policing, not to mention systemic anti-Blackness and colorism in courts and prisons.
Considering the myriad health disparities facing Black Americans, it makes sense to extrapolate the association between structural racism and deleterious health to disability, particularly chronic illnesses that are physically disabling.
To call the public’s attention to this correlation, the CDC in 2021 declared structural racism a public health emergency.
Ample evidence corroborates the CDC’s position, like a 2018 study that found that police killings of Black people triggered days of poor mental health among Black people residing in that same state, for up to three months afterward.
Further, racial stress starts so young. A Yale study found that preschool teachers “show a tendency to more closely observe Black students, and especially boys when challenging behaviors are expected.” Similarly, data from the Department of Education reveals that Black girls are 5.5x more likely to be suspended than white girls.
Criminalization also transcends sub-communities of the Black community. One in four queer Black men have experienced police harassment, according to a 2020 study highlighting how anti-Blackness intersects with well-documented anti-queerness among police.
Lambda Legal and the National Center for Transgender Equality report that “gay, lesbian, and bisexual youth are more likely to be stopped by the police and experience greater criminal justice sanctions not explained by greater involvement in violating the law or engaging in transgressive behavior.”
In one study, nearly 75% of LGBTQ people and people living with HIV reported face-to-face contact with police in the past year, likely due to increased rates of employment discrimination, homelessness, and family rejection.
Racism only compounds the structural pitfalls of cis-heteronormativity and, unsurprisingly, so does misogyny. Between 2015 and 2021, police killed 51 Black women and national media covered only half of these murders.
Surprisingly, however, making the case that racist policing drives disability is not as straightforward as one might assume — misconceptions about psychosomatic illness make it easy to dismiss the connection.
Prevailing stigma around psychosomatic disorders suggests that physical manifestations of psychological stress emerge from hallucinations or paranoia. Such framing dismisses and discredits all trauma survivors.
In particular, the stigma pathologizes racial trauma survivors as delusional conspiracy theorists or “radicals.” An historical example was “protest psychosis,” a fabricated medical diagnosis under which Civil Rights activists were involuntarily committed to carceral mental health wards.
Yet, it should not require a leap of imagination to consider how the trauma of racist policing may be driving the myriad health disparities plaguing Black Americans — not if we truly grasp the hard-wired nature of our mind-body connection, truly trust that trauma can cause epigenetic alterations and a dysregulated nervous system, and truly believe that racial trauma is a legitimate trauma.
On top of those established facts, there is also plenty of evidence linking chronic illness to racial stress, which biased policing likely induces in all targets. For instance, racial stress correlates with autoimmune disorders, hypertension, hunger and metabolism, and premature menopause.
Correspondingly, racial disparities exist for autoimmune, cardiac, endocrine (e.g. diabetes), gastrointestinal, and neurological disorders (e.g. Alzheimer’s disease, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s, and sleep disorders), in addition to birth defects and infant mortality.
Most disturbingly, all of these disparities are exacerbated by the fact that Black patients are systematically under-treated for pain.
It may take many more years of scientific research to trace the etiology of certain health disparities back to biased policing, specifically; nevertheless, a correlation between disability and racist policing is highly probable.
Moreover, continuing to exploring the ways in which economic, environmental, social, and structural disadvantages complicate disability is certainly a worthwhile endeavor.
But we must also give as much attention to how these conditions cause disability.
