Cumulative Exposure to Police-Involved Shootings and Mental Health Conditions in Minneapolis, Minnesota

Exposure to lethal or non-lethal police-involved shootings within communities has been shown to negatively impact individual mental health. Most literature has found this association through survey data that cannot speak to contemporaneous and cumulative impacts of police shootings. Given heterogeneity in both policing and community characteristics, immediate and granular mental health outcomes related to police-involved shootings must be explored. Our study examines how temporal community-level exposure to police shootings influences rates of mental health condition diagnosis at the ZCTA (ZIP code tabulation area) and month level using hospital discharge data from Minneapolis, Minnesota. For our exposures, we created a cumulative counter of police-involved shootings within ZCTAs and a lagged exposure indicator of police-involved shootings in the previous month. Using two-way fixed effect panel models, we find a nonlinear relationship between cumulative shooting exposure and rate of mental health diagnosis. As cumulative shootings increase, their effect on overall mental health diagnosis rate in Minneapolis increases until reaching a peak and then diminishes. This trend is similar across racial groups. This may be due to sensitization (increases in response to a certain point) and desensitization (diminishing responses after that point) as police shootings accumulate. In contrast, the effect of recent shooting exposures is null and weak, suggesting that it is the initial compounding, concentrated nature of police violence that exacts the greatest toll on community mental health. Findings highlight the need to investigate temporal exposure to police violence at granular levels to further understand its negative mental health impacts on community health.