Science AMA Series: I’m Dr. Nancy Krieger, Professor of Social Epidemiology at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. I recently published a paper calling for police killings and deaths to be tracked as health data, and I’m here to answer your questions!

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Hello, reddit!

I’mDr. Nancy Krieger, Professor of Social Epidemiology at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. My research focuses on how people’s health can be influenced by the conditions in which they are born, live and work, including how economic policies and systems, social norms, social policies, and political systems can affect health. My research also focuses on health inequities and how we can improve monitoring of health inequities, that is, unfair, unnecessary, and preventable differences in health status across social groups.

In a new paper released on December 8, 2015 in PLoS Medicine, “Police Killings and Police Deaths Are Public Health Data and Can Be Counted,” my research team and I proposed that all law enforcement-related deaths—including people killed by police as well as police killed in the line of duty—be treated not just as criminal data but as a “notifiable condition,” and that they be reported to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) by public health and medical professionals and published on a weekly basis as are a host of other conditions ranging from poisonings to pertussis to polio.

It is time to bring a public health perspective to this problem from a standpoint that emphasizes prevention and health equity. These deaths, like other violent deaths, are not a matter for criminal justice only. Their health impact includes and extends beyond those killed and their families to the broader communities in which these deaths occur and society overall.

To support our case, we presented data showing that, over the past 50 years, black men in the US have faced significantly greater risk than white men of being killed by police. In 1965, among black and white men ages 15-34 across the U.S., blacks were eight times more likely to be killed by police than whites; by 2005, blacks’ excess risk had declined, but was still three times higher than that of whites, on par with current estimates. We also found variations in risk across U.S. cities over time. New York and Cleveland have been particularly risky cities for blacks; in both cities, between 1960 and 2011, depending on the year, blacks’ risk of being killed by police ranged anywhere from 5 to 19 times higher than that of whites.

You can read more about our study on our website here, or read about via NPR, the Los Angeles Times, and the Guardian.

I’ll be here to answer your questions at 11:00 a.m. ET (8 am PST, 4 pm UTC); Ask Me Anything!

">Science AMA Series: I’m Dr. Nancy Krieger, Professor of Social Epidemiology at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. I recently published a paper calling for police killings and deaths to be tracked as health data, and I’m here to answer your questions!