Community Violence as a Population Health Issue Proceedings of a Workshop (2017) / Chapter Skim
Currently Skimming:
2 The Impact of Racism and Violence on Communities
2 The Impact of Racism and Violence on Communities
Pages 7-16
The Chapter Skim interface presents what we've algorithmically identified as the most significant single chunk of text within every page in the chapter.
Select key terms on the right to highlight them within pages of the chapter.
From page 7... ...
Moreover, those figures do not account for assaults that are not reported to the police, nor do they measure the 1 This chapter is the rapporteurs' synopsis of the presentation made by John A Rich, professor at the Drexel University Dornsife School of Public Health, and the statements have not been endorsed or verified by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
|
From page 8... ...
However, it cannot avoid dealing with racism given the health care system's past display of historic institutional racism, and the fact that there are disparities in medical care and a lack of diversity among health care providers. • All the efforts to reduce violence are not enough if there is not also an effort to address health equity.
|
From page 9... ...
He noted, too, that over the same 10-year period, 45,416 African American males under the age of 34 were killed by gunfire in the United States. Race, however, should not be the focus of the discussion about violence, said Rich.
|
From page 10... ...
As examples, he recounted Rodney King's brutal beating in 1991, Abner Louima's brutalization and torture by New York City police in 1997, the 1999 shooting of Amadou Diallo when police mistook his wallet for a gun as he was entering his home, and Sean Bell, the young groom who was shot 50 times by police on the day of his wedding in 2006. Rich said it is likely that between 2006 and 2012, when Trayvon Martin was killed by a vigilante in his Sanford, Florida, neighborhood, that there were other black male children and adults killed in the United States in a similar manner not brought to the public's attention.
|
From page 11... ...
He noted that in 2015, the police commissioner of New York City said, "Slavery, our country's original sin, sat on a foundation codified by laws enforced by police, by slave catchers." Today, said Rich, institutional racism is seen in the police policies that legitimize and even incentivize aggressive action against young men of color, with "stop and frisk" policies and racial profiling as examples. Rich recounted an incident in Philadelphia that involved the police being called by a ticket agent who said a young man did not pay his fare to board a train.
|
From page 12... ...
Studies in Chicago and Baltimore found that 44 percent of the individuals who had experienced a penetrating injury were injured again over the next 5 years and 20 percent of those individuals were dead. These data, Rich said, show that "efforts that focus on health care environments or places where victims are seen have to be part of a broader solution for interrupting the cycle of violence." A common image among those who work in medical settings is that someone repeatedly injured is involved in activities that predispose that person to violence, said Rich.
|
From page 13... ...
Individuals of color also report examples of personally mediated racism such as disrespectful treatment by health care providers and the phenomenon of mistaken identity, in which health care providers are mistaken for custodial staff, experiences that some may call microaggressions. There may also be internalized racism that manifests in persons of color preferring white providers because they have come to believe that providers of color could not possibly be as good as their white counterparts.
|
From page 14... ...
After receiving their training, the youth then share their experiences with other members of the health care team.5 In conclusion, Rich said, "In all of our efforts, we should be seeking to reduce violence, but it is not enough to reduce violence if we are not also addressing health equity." Addressing health equity requires a different level of resources, he added, because these young people are for the most part not plugged into what he called the grid of opportunity. "Young people of color often need help plugging into that grid of opportunity so that they can thrive and so that their health can improve and we can begin to address the social determinants of health," said Rich.
|
From page 15... ...
Too often, institutional racism cuts young people off from those opportunities if they have had an encounter with the criminal justice system. Sanne Magnan asked Rich about the bind African American police officers may feel when dealing with an African American youth.
|
From page 16... ...
Daniel Webster of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health commented that the War on Drugs has had an outsized impact on disadvantaged communities of color and in his opinion, reforming drug laws should be a central part of any population health approach to reducing violence in those communities. Rich said that was "absolutely right," though he noted that the police have had a negative impact on communities of color long before the War on Drugs.
|
Key Terms
This material may be derived from roughly machine-read images, and so is provided only to facilitate research.
More
information on Chapter Skim is available.