Christen Smith: The Fallout of Police Violence Is Killing Black Women Like Erica Garner

During Erica Garner's funeral, the Reverend Al Sharpton talked about Erica's unflinching determination to get justice for her father. Sharpton said, while they say "she died of a heart attack, no, her heart was attacked that day," referring to July 27, 2014, the day police killed her father, Eric Garner. In her recent article for The Conversation, titled "The fallout of police violence is killing black women like Erica Garner," University of Texas at Austin professor Christen Smith writes, "When we think of police lethality, we typically consider the immediate body count: The people that die from bullets and baton blows. The death toll gives the impression that black men are the disproportionate victims of police killings. But these numbers do not reveal the slow death that black women experience. The long-range trauma police brutality causes can be as deadly as a bullet. The pain of loss kills with heart attacks, strokes, depression and even anemia."