Police-related Stress and Carotid Intima Media Thickness Among African American Women

Anti-black police violence and harassment have been identified as public health issues. However, studies have primarily focused on direct and/or vicarious police encounters. A dearth of studies has also examined vigilance related to future police encounters, and to our knowledge, no studies have examined all 3 kinds of police-related stress among African American women.

We employed a latent class analysis (LCA) approach to identify classes of African American women ( N = 422), aged 30 to 46, based on the patterning of various forms of self-reported police-related stress: direct, vicarious, police-related vigilance for self, and police-related vigilance for children. We then examined associations between latent class membership and carotid intima media thickness (IMT), a marker of cardiovascular risk.

We identified 3 latent classes of police-related stress: (1) high child vigilance-high personal exposure, (2) no child vigilance-high personal exposure, and (3) moderate child vigilance-low self vigilance-low personal exposure class. Findings from the fully adjusted model reveal that the no child vigilance-high personal exposure class had lower common carotid artery (CCA) IMT than the high child vigilance-high personal exposure and moderate child vigilance-low self vigilance-low personal exposure classes.

Vigilance for children's future police encounters may be associated with increased cardiovascular risk in African American women. Agency, system, and policy-level solutions may be needed to reduce anti-black police violence and improve the cardiovascular health of this high-risk population.