Background

Who We Are:

End Police Violence Collective is a growing group of public health researchers, teachers, graduate students, non-profit leaders, and community organizers that came together to draft and organize around passing the APHA statement “Addressing Law Enforcement Violence as a Public Health Issue” and have since also drafted and passed the APHA statement, “Advancing Public Health Interventions to Address the Harms of the Carceral System.” These statements are rooted in the work of grassroots organizing against state-mediated violence. They are statements that recognize how structural racism and institutional oppression shape population patterns of criminalization, law enforcement violence, and incarceration and they are statements firmly committed to a public health alternative, recommending upstream, community-based and community-led solutions.

The prison industrial complex is a public health issue:

To work toward improving the health of all people, public health must examine and address all sources of poor health and well-being for our communities. State violence through policing and incarceration result in deaths, injuries, trauma, and stress, which disproportionately affect people of color and other marginalized populations such as immigrants, unhoused people, the LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer) community, and people with mental illness. We, as public health practitioners, researchers, and organizers must collectively approach state violence as a public health issue. That our field has taken a formal stance on this issue is an important step. The work continues!