Police can play a role in mental health crises among young people

New York City neighborhoods that experienced higher rates of policing during the Stop and Frisk years also experienced higher burdens of psychiatric hospitalization among their adolescents and young adults, independent of the neighborhood’s underlying socioeconomic characteristics. This association was greater in neighborhoods of color, which were disproportionately targeted by “hot spot” and law enforcement policing practices and policies.

The study, from researchers at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, is among the first to examine how neighborhood-level disparities in policing may be a key driver of the city’s unequal burden of mental illness, particularly among youth living in heavily policed ​​neighborhoods during a critical developmental period. The findings, which add to a growing body of evidence that aggressive policing is a social determinant of adolescent mental health, appear in the journal Social psychiatry and psychiatric epidemiology.

According to research cited in the new study, at least half of all recorded police stops in New York City involve people under the age of 25. Nationally, about a third of teens ages 12 to 18 have been stopped by police at least once, and about 21 percent of black boys, compared with 9 percent of white boys, have been stopped two or more times. Police stops have been linked to depressive symptoms in adolescents, and this association is twice as strong among young black men compared with young white men.

In the new study, researchers used publicly available data from the New York City Police Department (NYPD), psychiatric hospitalizations from the Statewide Planning and Research Cooperative System (SPARCS) data, and sociodemographic data from the American Community Survey (ACS). They focused on psychiatric hospitalizations of youth ages 10 to 24 and all police stops from 2006 to 2014, when the NYPD’s Stop Question and Frisk (SQF) program was in effect (SQF was ruled unconstitutional in 2013).

They found that an increase of one police incident per 1,000 residents was associated with a 0.3% increase in the rate of youth psychiatric hospitalizations. The rates of psychiatric hospitalization and policing were higher in neighborhoods with a higher percentage of black residents, and the association between these was also significantly higher in neighborhoods with a higher proportion of black residents compared to predominantly non-black neighborhoods.

The association between police incidents and psychiatric hospitalizations was strongest when restricted to SQF encounters and criminal summonses rather than the sum of all police incidents. This is evidence that the associations highlighted in the study are not explained by overall crime levels, a potential confounder, the authors explain. Police incidents in response to psychiatric emergencies, a potential source of reverse causality, are considered negligible.

The mental health effects of policing are both direct and indirect. People who live, work, and spend time in aggressively patrolled neighborhoods are frequently exposed to police through direct encounters or by witnessing encounters with friends, family, and neighbors.

More broadly, the study’s authors explain that the fabric of a neighborhood itself is shaped by a city that prioritizes policing over social support. Future research could examine the effects of policies and programs that shift resources away from policing and toward social and economic services.

“We know that direct and indirect exposure to police work can be a stressful and traumatic experience for individuals,” said Sam Packard, a doctoral student in the Department of Epidemiology at Columbia Mailman School of Public Health. “A growing body of research shows that the collective impact of this trauma as a form of structural violence is a public health problem, which is what we found in this analysis.”

“Our findings support what hyper-policed ​​communities have long known: exposure to aggressive policing is detrimental to individual and community health. Given rising rates of psychiatric disorders in adolescents, preventing and reducing mental illness will require not only individual treatments but also addressing the social and structural determinants, including over-policing,” added Seth J. Prins, Ph.D., assistant professor of Epidemiology and Sociomedical Sciences at the Columbia Mailman School of Public Health.

The findings are more than a historical footnote and are still relevant a decade after the Stop and Frisk program ended, Prins explains. “Even though Stop and Frisk has officially ended, we know that stops are still happening and they’re just not being recorded as such. So even if it’s happening less often, there’s still aggressive policing happening in different forms across the city.”

Prince has previously published studies on the consequences of domestic violence police actionhow school policing and discipline can lead to substance abuse among students, and the link between incarceration and premature death.

Co-authors of the new study also include Zoe Verzani, Megan C. Finsaas, Natalie S. Levy, Ruth Shefner and Amelia K. Boeme of Columbia Mailman and Arrianna M. Planey of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.