Sleep loss more common among African Americans after police-involved killings of unarmed Black people like Eric Garner and Tamir Rice: Study

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.

For more prominent police-involved deaths, there was a 11.4% increase in reporting very short sleep compared with the average for all Black survey respondents. For deaths, whether prominent or not, that happened in the same state as the survey respondent, the effect was a 6.5% increase.

This type of study cannot prove cause and effect. The researchers made adjustments for age, sex, education and other factors that might account for differences and still found the pattern of more sleep disturbance reports from Black people after police-involved deaths.

“Discrimination can manifest in all sorts of ways, one of which is unequal exposure to police use of force,” said Dr. Atheendar…