"We still don't see a change": addressing police violence as a public health inequity in Canada and media exposure as a vicarious harm in impacted communities

This dissertation addresses police violence as a public health inequity that has been understudied in Canadian public health scholarship. While public health scholarship is limited, police violence is known to produce ill health and disproportionately target people in Canada according to the logics of settler colonialism and neoliberal capitalism. A scoping review of empirical academic literature on the health impacts of police violence is mobilized to establish a foundational understanding from which Canadian health scholarship may grow. This review finds that psychological/emotional, physical, neglect, and sexual forms of police violence have been documented to enact a range of adverse health effects across racial and ethnic categories, gender identities and sexual orientations, and life experiences that are associated with structural discrimination. However, key gaps in the literature remain, with more work needed that is led by and traces the health impacts in Indigenous, Black, and Mad communities. The review then turns to the impacts of consuming media representations of police violence. As a multi-faceted source of harm, uncritical media prevents consciousness raising in audiences who are unaware of discriminatory policing and enacts harm on audiences who are aware of and have experienced police violence. Yet, this area is still underdeveloped within and beyond the Canadian context. The process and findings of a community-engaged research project that leverages participatory discourse analysis and integrated arts-based knowledge mobilization to address this gap are presented. The relational affordances and institutional barriers of participatory analysis and arts-based knowledge mobilization are discussed. Through comparative discourse analysis, community members explore news articles that portray police violence and evidence the detrimental impacts of consuming uncritical media. Through a strengths-based and action-oriented study, community members generated 13 helpful (likely to support justice and healing) and nine harmful (likely to prevent police accountability and invalidate the impacted community) reporting patterns. The patterns were then translated into six standards for reporting practices that can mobilize healing by validating community experiences of police violence and mobilize change by challenging understandings of police as a ubiquitous source of protection.