A study of nearly 1,900 fatal police encounters and millions of birth records in California suggests that police killings of unarmed black people may affect the health of black infants before they are even born. For example, a 2018 study in the Lancet linked police killings of unarmed black men with an increase in mental health problems for black people living in the same state. To probe this question, he examined 3.9 million California birth records from 2007 to 2016, including more than 246,000 for black infants. To control for differences among mothers, he also focused on black women who experienced these events during one pregnancy but not others. Again, infants born after a nearby police killing of an unarmed black person had lower birth weights, but their siblings did not.

Source: Los Angeles Times December 05, 2019 13:52 UTC