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In the current issue of AJPH, DeVylder et al. (p. 1704) examine police violence as a distinct form of violence and the implications of this distinction for mental health. As they show in Table 1 in their article, several studies connect police violence to poor mental health. Police brutality-acts of violence as well as conduct that dehumanizes without conscious intent-affects mental health so profoundly that it is associated with antenatal depression among Black women.1 Black people are five times more likely to worry about police brutality than are Whites.2 Indeed, the stress from trying to avoid the police is a mechanism through which previous incarceration increases the odds of depressive symptoms among Black men.3
What makes police violence distinctively detrimental for mental health? DeVylder et al. argue that the answer lies in three categories of factors: those that increase exposure to police violence, those that exacerbate its impact on mental health, and those that make it hard for victims to cope. Their conceptualization of the mechanisms through which police violence affects mental health is consistent with the stress process model: a prominent sociological framework for understanding variability in mental health outcomes. According to the stress process, group differences in mental health originate from group differences in exposure to stressors and in access to resources that enable people to cope orthat buffer the impact of stressors on mental health.4 In the case of police violence, several factors concurrently increase exposure, exacerbate impact, and impede coping. In my view, DeVylder et al. make a strong theoretical contribution to the conceptualization of police brutality as an institutionally patterned stressor sustained by White supremacy. I explore the implications of this conceptualization.
Stressors are experiences and conditions that produce stress. Exposure to stressors is grounded in social conditions: those with the most marginalized statuses are disproportionately at risk over the life course.4 Police brutality is a stressor because its victims are predominantly persons marginalized by oppressive structures. For research, this means that as we document structural causes of ill health, we must assess exposure to stressors that are salient among populations marginalized by structural inequality, such as police brutality. We must also specify the role of racism when we measure police brutality as a stressor. Brown...