Police Role in Racial Trauma

In the summer of 2014, Tatiana Sheppard, then about 14 years old, was scrolling through Instagram when she came across a news report that caught her attention.

In hopes of finding out more about the incident, she Googled it.

The article she read included a video that showed a black man in New York being tackled to the ground by New York Police Department officers and being put into a chokehold before passing out.

The man in the video was Eric Garner.

“I started crying, I was very enraged, I was disgusted,” said Sheppard, now 20 years old.

Black young adults like Sheppard experience similar emotions when they are exposed to videos of police brutality over and over again.

Psychological experts say that constant exposure to these kinds of images can increase the levels of racial trauma experienced by African American young adults and impact their long-term health.

Dr. Gimel Rogers, an adjunct professor at Pepperdine University and licensed psychologist, said that the more people see images of police brutality, the more the images become ingrained in their memory. The amygdala, the part of the brain that triggers the fear response, then enters a hyper-aroused state leading to increased stress hormones that could negatively impact the immune system and make individuals more predisposed to different illnesses and diseases.“

Racial trauma is an epidemic in and of itself,” said Rogers.

Dr. Rogers defines racial trauma as an event that disrupts the very fabric of one’s being based on their phenotype, physical presentation.

“Without a shadow of a doubt, if you’re black, you’re going to experience some form of racial trauma at some point in your life, you just may not identify it as such,” said Rogers.

Continued exposure to videos of police brutality has forced young adults within black communities to deal with levels of trauma that impact their everyday lives.

“I’m more impacted because I mean, it's my people that’s getting killed for being black and breathing,” said 19-year-old, Khrystle Releford. “It’s traumatized me to the point where if I do see a white cop, I get scared, my body tenses up, and I’m scared that they’ll just pull me over for no reason. It makes me scared to go out.”

Others agree that each new police brutality incident has more or the same amount of impact on them mentally and emotionally.

“I am definitely a bit triggered when I see different types of videos and it creates a certain kind of rage within my spirit and within my emotional state that I believe is permanent,” said Sheppard.

“I think police brutality is like one of the more popular ways of black trauma that we experience on a regular basis,” said Xzaviah Stone, 28, a black father to a two-year-old son. “For me, it gets annoying because there’s no difference between news and entertainment. You see it in a movie and then you turn on your news and you’re seeing the same actions happen in real life on television.”

Psychological experts have an explanation for why young black adults in their teens and early twenties may be more impacted by images of police brutality than someone in their 50s or older.

Regardless of race, ethnicity, or country, violent crime tends to peak for individuals in their late teenage years, according to Dr. Roshni Ladny, full-time assistant professor of teaching in criminology at The University of Tampa and clinical mental health therapist.

“Your brain is not fully developed until the age of 23 or 24 and testosterone levels in males increases around 18, 19, and 20,” said Ladny. “You look at all those factors and they are being the ones that are exposed to this, it can incite more aggression.”

Aside from the mental impacts that police brutality videos have on black individuals, the videos may also damage black communities and encourage crime.

“When you see cases of law enforcement acting callously or abusing their power, all it does is further the chances that people, especially people in lower SES, high crime areas will not report being victimized,” said Ladny. "If they don’t report being victimized, you’re not only further increasing their chance of victimizing, but we are literally creating future offenders.”

As police brutality incidents have continued to increase, some have lost all trust in law enforcement and they cannot help but wonder if someone close to them will be the next victim of police brutality.

“The rate at which African Americans are killed by police is more than twice as high as the rate for white Americans according to a study on racial trauma by Dr. Rogers and one of her colleagues, Dr. Thema Bryant-Davis, at Pepperdine University.

“My trust with cops, it’s not up there at all because they’re supposed to protect each and every person and go with protocol, but they just totally forget all that once they get out of training,” said Releford. “It’s like I don’t know which ones are the good ones and I don’t know which ones are the bad ones.”

“It’s just a faulty, terrible system,” said Stone. “Police officers used to be slave catchers, so they still have that same mentality. I think I trust them to be who we see them to be, so I don’t expect them to actually do their job in my favor.”

Stone cannot recall an encounter with a police officer that was not negative, but unlike some, he is more afraid of civilians that do not look like him calling the police and more afraid for the safety of his son.

“I think every encounter that I had with them was overly aggressive,” said Stone.

A common response from those previously mentioned is that a police officer would be the last person they would call if they needed help.

Some black law enforcement officers also disagree with the behaviors of wrongful police officers that occur both on and off camera and worry about the safety of their children.

“There are racist people in law enforcement,” said Delaney Jefferson, a black former El Paso County Deputy Sheriff. “I think those people need to be weeded out and leave before this keeps happening and eventually, we’re going to get tired and we’re going to start policing the police and I don’t want to see that happen because there are some good cops out there.”

Jefferson served as a sworn officer for eight of the 12 years that he was in law enforcement.

He received training for street patrol, Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT), and deputy work, and he is still disappointed with the tactics that have been utilized by officers involved with police brutality.

“I don’t agree with a lot of the things going on,” said Jefferson. “Yeah, I used to be one of them, but every time I see it, like with George Floyd, that’s not something that they teach in the academy.”

Law enforcement needs to make more of an effort to evolve and adapt to the ever-changing culture of black and Hispanic people and the biggest problem is that the adaptation is not happening, according to Jefferson.

“It just has to be that trust factor and police have to really just get out there in the community and stop killing us for the most part,” said Jefferson. “Stop killing us, please.”