Policing and Population Health: Past, Present, and Future

Emerging scholarship has situated policing as an undeniable social determinant of health and wellbeing in the United States. Still, progress in understanding the precise role that law enforcement plays in the production of population health has been slowed by significant, long-standing data limitations. While considerable gains have been made – often via the efforts of non-state actors and organizations – in developing data systems monitoring the health harms of law enforcement, our ability to describe the varied pathways through which policing systems function as a social determinant of health remains difficult due to the lack of national, comprehensive, publicly available data. In this paper, we describe this persistent issue in detail, highlighting past gains and continuing data issues, before turning our attention to possible solutions.