As a means of accountability and transparency, activists and academics have hammered home the position that police killings are a public health issue for the last year and a half. Researchers at Harvard have seconded that proposition, calling the issue an “epidemic” and have now put forth a proposal to get it done. Simply making a death by police a “notifiable condition,” similar to a death from a “notifiable disease” such as botulism, cholera or smallpox, is all that’s needed. The researchers state:
“No act of Congress is needed. No police department need be involved. Public health agencies can do the job. Public health experts, working with the US Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists (which issues recommendations for notifiable conditions) and with public input, can together create uniform case definitions and surveillance protocols to compile, in one uniform system, both: (a) deaths caused by law-enforcement officials (whether in the public or private sector, e.g., both local police officers and private security guards) and (b) occupational fatalities of law-enforcement officials.”
The researchers at Harvard decried the fact that folks in the U.S. are (somewhat) reliant on a United Kingdom-based publication such as The Guardian to find out how many folks are killed over here by police. They did not mention that the Washington Post is also giving the tally a shot. No pun intended.
The Harvard study and its authors make a clear case for why such a proposal is necessary:
“The role of public health is to document the deaths that have occurred; it is a separate matter, in the realm of the legal system, to determine the circumstances under which the deaths have occurred (e.g., whether use of force was justifiable or not). However, in addition to the harms experienced directly by individuals due to law-enforcement–related violence, there is another important casualty: the public health harms that arise from the damage rendered to the body politic itself. Police are one of the most visible “faces” of government, whose work daily puts them in view of the public they are sworn to protect. Combine excess police violence with inadequate prosecution of such violence, and the ties that bind citizens and their democratically elected governments become deeply frayed, with vicious cycles of distrust and violence fueling dysfunctional policing and dysfunctional governance more generally. The direct effects and spill-over effects matter for public health and medicine alike, as reflected in the impact on emergency medical services, trauma units, mental health, and the trust required to deliver and implement any government-sponsored program, public health or otherwise.”
Here’s to hoping they are successful on this front of the struggle for accountability and transparency, as well as an end to rampant police killings.