Health & Fitness

NYers Abused By Cops More Likely To Be Sick, City Study Shows

Being threatened by police or locked in jail is linked to lasting health problems, the city's Department of Health says.

The city's Health Department says there's a link between involvement with the criminal justice system and long-lasting health problems.
The city's Health Department says there's a link between involvement with the criminal justice system and long-lasting health problems. (Photo by Renee Schiavone/Patch)

NEW YORK — Trouble with the law might make you sick. Long-term health problems are more likely to plague New Yorkers who have had contact with the criminal justice system, a new city study says.

Poor physical and mental health, hypertension and binge drinking are all more prevalent among people who have been abused by police, put behind bars or on probation or parole than those who have not, according to a report the city's Department of Health released Tuesday.

The disparities spurred the Health Department to urge doctors to ensure that patients who have been entangled in the criminal system can receive the health care they often struggle to access.

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"The data show that involvement with the criminal justice system — even brief contact with the police or indirect exposure — is associated with lasting harm to people’s physical and mental health," Dr. Oxiris Barbot, the city's health commissioner, said in a statement.

Nearly 2.4 million New Yorkers — or more than a third of the city's population — have had some kind of involvement with the criminal justice system, a 2017 Health Department survey found. That number includes people who have been incarcerated; put on parole or probation; and threatened, abused, stopped, searched or questioned by police, according to the agency.

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Those experiences were disproportionately distributed across racial groups — 16 percent of black New Yorkers had been threatened or abused by cops, more than triple the rate of 5 percent for white New Yorkers, the report says.

A range of health problems were more common among who had had such encounters with the law, the city's study shows.

Some 29 percent of people who had been physically threatened or abused by the police said they were in poor physical health, more than twice the rate of 12 percent for those who had not, the Health Department says.

New Yorkers who had been locked up or under community supervision were more than twice as likely to be in poor mental health as those who had not, the report shows. And 15 percent of people who had been stopped, questioned or searched by cops reported that health problems frequently got in the way of their daily activities, compared with 9 percent of people who had not, according to the Health Department.

New Yorkers who have histories with the criminal system also often face "administrative barriers to obtaining health care, as well as stigma related to incarceration" despite their heightened risk for health problems, Barbot wrote in a letter to doctors.

The letter is part of the Health Department's campaign to educate health care providers about the link between health issues and involvement with the criminal justice system. Staffers will visit nearly 160 medical practices in Harlem, Brooklyn and the South Bronx as part of the effort, which will go through early January, health officials said. The department has also released an online "Criminal Justice Action Kit" for providers.

"What New York is doing is smart — people don’t often see how the health care system and criminal justice are interlinked," Sarah Shannon, a University of Georgia sociologist, told BuzzFeed News, which first reported on the Health Department's study on Monday. "But especially in our era of mass incarceration, there has been a lot of evidence they have to affect each other."


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