After police kill unarmed black people, sleep becomes worse – but only for black people

The new sleep studies involved federal data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System and the American Time Use Survey between 2013 and 2019. Researchers used time-stamped surveys from about 190,000 black people and about 1,846,000 white people who were randomly called. by telephone and asked, among other things, how much sleep they got.

Statistical data from the Police violence mapped out database, the researchers identified whether a police killing of an unarmed black person had occurred in a survey respondent's state in the past three months. If they found it, they compared the respondent's sleep duration with that of people who had been called before the murder. They also compared the answers with those of respondents who were interviewed at a similar time, but outside the region.

Survey responses were sorted by whether respondents' total sleep time fell below seven hours, which is considered “short sleep,” or six hours, which is considered “very short sleep,” as this threshold is even has been even more closely linked to poor health outcomes.

After controlling for a range of factors, such as seasonal temperatures and unemployment rates, they found that black people were 2.7 percent more likely to experience less than seven hours of sleep in the first three months after an officer-involved killing of an unarmed black person man. person in their state compared to before the murder, and 6.5 percent more likely to report less than six hours of sleep compared to before.

To address possible biases, the researchers looked at links between sleep and other events, such as police killings of armed black people or unarmed white people, but found no significant links. They also applied regression models to samples of white respondents and found that the associations between sleeper and police killings were not statistically significant.

To account for the fact that police killings would likely affect people across state lines, they designed a second study, which looked at the impact of high-profile killings at the national level. The study compared changes in sleep patterns among black respondents before and after the murders with changes among white respondents – essentially subtracting the differences seen in white respondents from those seen in black respondents.

Here the magnitude of the findings was even greater. The national-level analysis found that black people were 4.6 percent more likely to report less than seven hours of sleep and 11.4 percent more likely to report less than six hours of sleep in the months after the murder, compared to white people people who were interrogated during the murder. that time.