Black adults who are exposed to news of police killings of unarmed Black people are more likely to suffer from poor sleep in the months to come than white adults, according to a study published Monday in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine.
The new research highlights the insidious toll police violence takes on the Black community.
Police killings not only affect victims and their families but can have “pernicious spillover effects” onto the public at large, said the lead study author, Dr. Atheendar Venkataramani, an associate professor of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania.
The findings looked at survey results about sleep duration from 2013 through 2019 from two U.S. databases. The larger of the two, the Behavioral Risk Factor and Surveillance Survey, included responses from 181,865 Black and nearly 1.8 million white participants. The other, the American Time Use Survey, included data from 9,858 Black respondents and 46,532 white respondents.
Even at the baseline, Black participants were more likely to report getting less sleep than white participants. Forty-six percent reported getting less than 7 hours of sleep a night, deemed “short sleep,” compared to 33% of white participants, in the Behavioral Risk Factor and Surveillance Survey. About 18% of Black respondents reported getting less than six hours of sleep a night, or “very short sleep,” compared to 10% of white respondents.
The researchers then looked at what happened to sleep after 331 police-involved killings of unarmed Black people. They found that Black people’s sleep worsened in the six months that followed police killings, while white people had no change in their sleep.
The impact was greater for police killings that rose to national prominence, such as the killing of Eric Garner in New York in 2014. After such deaths, the study found, Black people reported a 4.6% increase in short sleep and an 11.4% increase in very short sleep, compared with…
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