The Washington Post’s “Fatal Force” database found that, of the nearly 1,000 people killed by police in 2018, 229 were black. A 2017 study in the Lancet, a leading British medical journal, reported that the continuing news of black people being killed by police “might have spillover effects on the mental health of people not directly affected” by the killings and that “mental health impacts were not observed among white respondents and resulted only from police killings of unarmed black Americans.” A NPR podcast dives deeper with the study’s researchers into how the shootings culminate into adverse effects.
The number of African-Africans killed and the study tie into a 2018 article by The New York Times that tackles the deteriorating mental health of Black Lives Matter activists.