In Minneapolis, home to George Floyd, heavy policing is tied to higher rates of preterm births
The longstanding toll of police violence on Black communities came into sharp relief last year with the murder of George Floyd. Now, a research team from Minneapolis, a city traumatized by the police killings of Floyd and other unarmed Black men, has published a study showing that the impact of even routine policing extends deeply and pervasively into communities, and may adversely affect the health of pregnant women and their babies.
In a study being published Wednesday in JAMA Network Open, scientists examined rates of preterm birth, a problem Black people are nearly twice as likely to experience as white people, and found that people living in neighborhoods with a high number of police contacts were twice as likely to experience a preterm birth.
