The effect of police violence on Black Americans' health is documented in 2 new studies

Two new studies track the effect of police violence on Black Americans

The effect of police violence on Black Americans is tracked in two new studies, with one tying police-involved deaths to sleep disturbances and the other finding a racial gap in injuries involving police use of Tasers.

The health effects of police violence on Black people “need to be documented as a critical first step to reduce these harms,” three editors of JAMA Internal Medicine wrote in an editorial published Monday with the studies.

For the sleep study, researchers looked at responses from more than 2 million people from 2013 through 2019 in two large government surveys. They focused on people's reports of sleep in the months following police-involved killings of unarmed Black people.

They found a pattern of sleep disturbances, particularly getting less than six hours of sleep, in Black people — but not among white people — in the six months following a police-involved killing.

For the years studied, police-involved killings of unarmed Black people totaled 331 in the database used by the researchers: Mapping Police Violence, a project using Justice Department statistics and crowdsourced databases. The killings included cases that gained national attention such as the deaths of Eric Garner and Tamir Rice, as well as others less widely known.