Rethinking Policing as a Public Health Issue
Preview:
As a former college president and a university physician, we’ve been heartened by some medical researchers’ recent assertions that many issues involving policing -- gun deaths, sexual violence, domestic brutality, alcohol and drug use, among others -- can and should be framed as public health problems requiring research and study. For instance, in a commentary in The American Journal of Medicine, Leana S. Wen, at George Washington University, and Nakisa Sadeghi, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, cite a 2020 federal allocation of $25 million to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health for research on gun violence. Wen and Sadeghi comment that this investment in research “represents an important opportunity to depoliticize the gun violence epidemic by using a public health approach.”
Originally published: July 12, 2021
Author: William G. Durden
Position: President Emeritus
Institution: Dickinson College
Published by: Inside Higher Ed