Exposure to police-related deaths and physiological stress among urban black youth

Abstract

Background: Emerging evidence indicates that exposure to police-related deaths is associated with negative health and wellbeing outcomes among black people. Yet, no study to date has directly examined the biological consequences of exposure to police-related deaths for urban black youth.

Methods and findings: We employ unique data from the 2014-16 Adolescent Health and Development in Context (AHDC) study - a representative sample of youth ages 11 to 17 residing in the Columbus, OH area. A subsample of participants contributed nightly saliva samples for cortisol for up to six days, providing an opportunity to link recent exposures to police-related deaths within the residential county to physiological stress outcomes during the study period (N = 585). We examine the effect of exposure to a recent police-related death in the same county on the physiological stress (nightly cortisol) levels of black youth. We find evidence of elevated average levels of nightly cortisol (by 46%) for black boys exposed to a police-related death of a black victim in the 30 days prior to the subject's cortisol collection. We find no evidence of police-related death effects on the physiological stress levels of black girls or white youth.

Conclusions: These analyses indicate that police-related deaths influence the biological functioning of black boys, with potential negative consequences for health. We consider the implications of exposure to lethal police violence among black boys for understanding racial disparities in health more broadly.

Keywords: cortisol; physiological stress; police killings; police-related deaths.

Fig 1.

Black Victims of Police-Related Deaths in Franklin County, Ohio, February 2014 – June 2015. The blue dots mark the geographic locations of the 5 police-related deaths of black victims in Franklin County, Ohio, during the study period of February 2014 to June 2015. For reference, the darker shaded area represents the borders of the city of Columbus municipal boundaries in 2014. The study participants were recruited from the entire area within Interstate 270 that surrounds the central part of the city.

Fig 2.

Distribution of average log cortisol for black males and other youth by police-related death exposure period. Dark red dots represent black male respondents (one for each individual); gray dots represent all other respondents. The x-axis represents time, increasing from left (April 2014) to right (June 2015) across the study period. Vertical dark blue lines represent the date of a police-related death. The dark blue shaded area immediately to the right of the killing covers the 30-day period immediate following a killing; the light blue shaded area covers the 31 to 60 day period after a killing. Youth participants who fall in the darker areas are exposed to a police-related death within 30 days prior to their participation in the study. Participants in the lighter areas are exposed to a police-related death in the 31 to 60 days before their participation. The y-axis is the average log cortisol (in ug/dL) for each individual, averaged across days in the study period.

Fig 3.

Predicted average cortisol among black adolescents by gender and exposure to a police-related death in the last 30 days. The predicted average cortisol values (ug/dL) are shown for each gender and exposure combination. Higher values indicate higher average cortisol. Error bars represent 95% confidence intervals of the predicted individual-level average cortisol, holding all other covariates constant at their mean.