Can We “Do No Harm” with the Police by Our Side?
By: Dr. Billy Burrough
Tags: Mental Health, Police, Doctors, Racism, Healthcare

“I can breathe” is what I hear from children in the emergency department after they are given albuterol for their asthma attack.

“I can breathe” is what I hear from teenagers dealing with anxiety after finally connecting with a behavioral health therapist.

“I can’t breathe” is what George Floyd, Eric Garner, and the Black community have shouted, gasped, and internalized as the result of police violence and years of systemic racism.

As communities, school districts, and other organizations grapple with their relationships with police departments in the aftermath of the extrajudicial killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, it is time for the medical community to rethink our complicity.

For the majority of communities around the nation, if a person is experiencing a mental health crisis it is an armed police officer that comes knocking at the door, often with deadly results. Is this really the right person we want to respond to a person in psychological distress? In the medical world, doctors go through years of residency and fellowship training to specialize in their area of expertise. You don’t call in a pediatrician like me to perform an appendectomy, you call in the trained surgeon. We shouldn’t be calling in armed police officers with little to no mental health training to respond in these situations. We should be calling in medics and social workers. Some communities have successfully started such programs, diverting public safety dollars to these trauma-informed practices. That is what defunding the police looks like, and we shouldn’t just ask for it, we should demand it as medical professionals.

Beyond the mental health crisis, police officers and armed security guards are increasingly patrolling the wards and emergency departments under the guise of safety. The shooting of Alan Pean in 2015 should have been a wake up call to the nation’s hospitals that deadly weapons have no place in our walls of healing. There are many mixed emotions from hospital staff and patients regarding the presence of armed guards and police officers in hospital settings. There are no comprehensive studies looking at their impact on the physical and emotional health of our patients and staff. In medicine, we demand evidence before we will recommend even the simplest of therapies or laboratory tests. The presence of armed security should be no different. We ban smoking for hundreds of feet outside our hospital because we understand the health implications. Police violence is the sixth leading cause of death for young Black men in this country, yet we invite police officers inside our hospitals. It is long overdue for us to rethink our relationship with law enforcement and critically examine who they are there to protect and to serve. For our Black and Brown patients, visitors, and hospital staff are we providing a sense of security or just another reason to distrust the medical establishment?

From Tuskegee to Henrietta Lacks our healthcare system has used Black bodies to its benefit while simultaneously lobbying to prevent universal healthcare to keep the inequitable status quo of private health insurers that put profit over people. Hospitals and health insurance companies have plenty of self-reflection and reparations to do to become the “woke,” anti-racist institutions that the many new social media posts and commercials are proclaiming they are. While words have meaning and the outpouring of public statements should be acknowledged as progress, words without action are meaningless. It is action that has the power to heal. The action of reimagining our relationship with police departments is one small thing that we can do as medical professionals and institutions to show to our Black patients and colleagues that not only do their lives matter but that we are dedicated to the movement and not just the moment.