Racism and Policing: New Study Finds Strong Correlation

FEATURING ALDINA MESIC – A new study conducted at Boston University has lent greater credibility to the Black Lives Matter movement and to a travel advisory that the NAACP issued for African Americans traveling to the state of Missouri last year.

Researchers at BU’s School of Public Health ranked states in the nation by a “racism index” that was based on residential segregation and other markers of structural racism, and found that police killings of unarmed African Americans are correlated with that racism index. In other words, the more racist a state, the more likely black people were to be killed at the hands of police.

Such research makes the case that rather than treating police killings of unarmed black Americans on a case-by-case basis, we have to view them within existing social frameworks.

Aldina Mesic, Research Assistant at the Department of Community Health Sciences, Boston University School of Public Health, lead author of the paper which was published in the Journal of the National Medical Association.

**This interview was originally broadcast on February 13, 2018.