it's widely believed that investing in policing and police activity helps to keep communities safer well a new study published by ruters might just flip that idea on its head the study reveals firstofits-kind research that shows a correlation between police expenditures and suicide deaths among black residents as well as police perpetrated killings of black residents on the flip side the study finds that increased spending in housing reduces both of those death rates i'm joined now by one of the study's authors devin english who's an associate professor in the department of urban global public health at the rucker school of public health devon thanks so much for for taking the time to talk with us today now i know that you used census data to conduct this study what can you explain about what you found in terms of the connection between spending on policing and the rates of black suicide and killings by police what we found uh in looking at uh police spending and these other uh areas of spending was that in years in which uh police funding increased uh the year following we saw uh black suicide increase as well so there was always the one-year delay in your study yeah so we looked at two different delays right so he looked at what was happening the next year and then what was happening five years afterwards okay we know that correlation does not equal causation were you able to prove causation that because there was an increase in police spending there was a direct increase in black killings and black suicide yeah so really important point we are looking at correlation here you also looked at investments made into housing and you saw a different outcome there explain that yeah so it was actually the opposite um of the effect that we saw with police funding and that was increases in housing and uh community development funding uh were actually associated with decreases in black suicide uh the next year so there's another piece of this that i found interesting um you looked at suicide among white students and that uh showed there was there was a connection there between investments in k to2 spending on education um but not the same for black residents can you explain that yeah so uh we did find that uh increases in k through 12 education funding were associated with decreases in suicide for white residents uh but not black residents what do you believe are the key takeaways from this study especially if you're giving any kind of advice to state or local municipal leaders yeah really uh important question u so we fund the police uh to do much more than um homicide response and prevention uh we ask them to uh do mental health response right uh like showing up for those who are having mental health crises um like suicide attempts substance use uh and serious mental illness in fact uh estimates suggest that about 25% of police work includes mental health response right and so uh it's it's really important that uh we understand the impact of what we're funding the police to do because we've seen their responsibilities increase over time right and over the last decade uh at the same time we've seen increases in police funding we've seen increases in suicide we've seen increases uh in police perpetrated shooting uh and killing more broadly and so what is and so what is your message what is it that funding needs to be spent differently needs to be spent on on mental health resources or other resources in the community i think we need to look at what at uh potential alternatives uh to mental health response there are um civilian-led response teams uh throughout the us they tend to be uh underfunded and we don't have great data on their impact uh and you know we did find that there are important alternatives that can potentially support um reduce suicide and reduce police perpetrated shooting uh police perpetrated killing uh and that is housing and community development uh and education all right devin english associate professor at the rucker school of public health thank you so much thanks so much for having me [Music]