By Jacob Bor, Atheendar S Venkataramani, David R Williams, Alexander C Tsai

Background Police kill more than 300 black Americans—at least a quarter of them unarmed—each year in the USA. These events might have spillover effects on the mental health of people not directly affected. Methods In this population-based, quasi-experimental study, we combined novel data on police killings with individual-level data from the nationally representative 2013–15 US Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) to estimate the causal impact of police killings of unarmed black Americans on self-reported mental health of other black American adults in the US general population. The primary exposure was the number of police killings of unarmed black Americans occurring in the 3 months prior to the BRFSS interview within the same state. The primary outcome was the number of days in the previous month in which the respondent’s mental health was reported as “not good”. We estimated difference-in-differences regression models—adjusting for state-month, monthyear, and interview-day fixed effects, as well as age, sex, and educational attainment. We additionally assessed the timing of effects, the specificity of the effects to black Americans, and the robustness of our findings. Findings 38 993 (weighted sample share 49%) of 103710 black American respondents were exposed to one or more police killings of unarmed black Americans in their state of residence in the 3 months prior to the survey. Each additional police killing of an unarmed black American was associated with 0·14 additional poor mental health days (95% CI 0·07–0·22; p=0·00047) among black American respondents. The largest effects on mental health occurred in the 1–2 months after exposure, with no significant effects estimated for respondents interviewed before police killings (falsification test). Mental health impacts were not observed among white respondents and resulted only from police killings of unarmed black Americans (not unarmed white Americans or armed black Americans). Interpretation Police killings of unarmed black Americans have adverse effects on mental health among black American adults in the general population. Programmes should be implemented to decrease the frequency of police killings and to mitigate adverse mental health effects within communities when such killings do occur.

Lancet 2018; 392: 302–10 

By Emma Russell, Hui Zhou, Gabriela Franich

This report documents how women experiencing domestic and family violence (DFV) are policed and criminalised. It presents findings from a research project conducted by Fitzroy Legal Service (FLS) in partnership with La Trobe University with the support of a Victorian Law Foundation Knowledge Grant (2020-21). The research aimed to identify how women who experience a range of social, economic, health and legal issues – including but not limited to DFV – become caught up in the criminal legal system.1 Investigating this point of overlap or interchange between social, financial, health or civil matters on the one hand, and criminal legal matters on the other, can help practitioners and policy strategists to explore the opportunities for systemic changes and collaborative support models that would prevent women’s criminalisation. Our use of the term women is inclusive of both cis and trans women. By using the term criminalisation, we hope to draw attention to the processes and mechanisms through which social problems come to be treated as criminal legal problems; and to highlight that there are alternatives. To investigate the relationships between criminalisation and women’s experiences of social, economic, health and/or civil legal issues, we adopted three methods of data collection and analysis: • the review and classification of 108 anonymised Fitzroy Legal Service client case files relating to women with criminal legal matters • the retrieval of publicly available statistical data on women in prison and women respondents on intervention orders • the thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews with 11 legal and social service practitioners with current experience of working with criminalised women These methods generated rich quantitative and qualitative data on the policing and criminalisation of women, especially women experiencing DFV and allowed us to identify opportunities for systemic changes that would prevent criminalisation. Much of what we found has already been spoken and written about at length by women and gender diverse people with lived experience of imprisonment.2 We intend for this research to supplement their expertise and lend further evidence to their campaigns and calls for action. By triangulating the data gathered and analysed through the methods above, this report explores the following questions and main findings, outlined in Table 1

Melbourne: Fitzroy Legal Service, 2022. 44p.

By Cubides Kovacsics, María Inés; Lanz Sánchez, Alejandro

Since September of 2012, we have been conducting Participatory Action Research (PAR) in the center of Bogotá with sex workers regarding their right to the public space known as 'La Mariposa' (The Butterfly), an open‐air plaza where they often face discriminatory urban praxis and frequent abuse by police officers. While our PAR team has conducted research in 'The Butterfly' for over five years, the objectives, motivation and design of this PAR project were defined by community‐based peer leaders and driven by their concerns and testimonies about the abuse and discrimination they have experienced from police in the plaza. Sex workers in the plaza have described these experiences in terms of unjustified detention, physical and verbal abuse, discrimination and abuse due to sexual orientation, and urban displacement. In this paper, we will discuss our PAR team's action research agenda and our collective work promoting sex worker's re‐appropriation of their right to public space and the city. We will provide concrete examples of ethical dilemmas we have faced in the field and the corresponding praxis our PAR team developed to negotiate and overcome these dilemmas through our 'PARCES' (Translated Acronym: Peers in Action Reaction Against Social Exclusion) methodology. The principles of 'PARCES' and 'action‐reaction' guide our decision‐making process with research actors throughout the construction of the action research design, implementation and analysis in order to incorporate participatory relations and the consideration of research actors' safety, health, and rights within the ethical framework of the project.

Bogotá, Colombia: Universidad de los Andes ‐ Escuela de Gobierno Alberto Lleras Camargo, 2014. 32p.