The mental health consequences of George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis in Black, Latine, and White communities

The high-profile police murder of George Floyd is likely to have an aftermath of negative health consequences, particularly among Black people. Our study evaluates the impact of the murder of Mr. Floyd on mental health in Black, Latine, and white communities in Minneapolis, Minnesota. We constructed a panel dataset merging data from the Minnesota Hospital Association, Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, Minneapolis Police Department, and American Community Survey. First, we specify an overall and racial subgroup autoregressive interrupted time-series design to identify the impact of the murder on rates of mental health hospital discharge at the city-level. We then examine the spatial heterogeneity in the impact of the murder by specifying zip code tabulation area (ZCTA)-level panel models. We find a 0.23 per 1,000 increase in mental health conditions among Black people in the immediate post-murder period, followed by a weekly decline (-.007) in mental health diagnoses. We do not find a substantial rate increase in White or Latine residents. Further, our analyses at the ZCTA-week-level corroborate these findings, while showing that the increase for Black residents was global. These findings speak to the traumatizing effects of police violence and the short- and longer-term public health consequences for Black communities.