Primary Submission Category: Place/Communities
Neighborhood-level aggressive policing and racialized inequities in preterm birth in Seattle, Washington
Authors: Taylor Riley Anjum Hajat
Presenting Author: Taylor Riley*
Most studies capturing the health effects of police violence focus on the direct effects on individuals, but a burgeoning field of study is capturing the community-level and vicarious health effects of policing. Police violence is a reproductive justice issue, but few empirical studies have examined policing as a determinant of racialized inequities in preterm birth. We conducted a multilevel study on the association between neighborhood-level aggressive policing, including use-of-force and stop-and-frisk practices, on preterm birth (< 37 weeks) in Seattle, Washington from 2017-2019. We hypothesized racially minoritized birthing people in neighborhoods with higher rates of aggressive policing will experience increased preterm birth risk due to the hypothesized mechanism of elevated levels of stress of living in heavily surveilled neighborhoods. Geocoded data from Seattle Police Department was spatially and temporally linked with all singleton births from the Washington Department of Health Birth Certificate data for the following exposure windows: cumulative average of 1 year before pregnancy and each trimester of pregnancy, which have been identified as sensitive periods. For the time periods during gestation, birth will be analyzed as a time-to-event outcome using multilevel Cox proportional hazard models. The pre-pregnancy exposure window will be analyzed with a modified Poisson regression model with a binary preterm birth outcome. All models will include random effects for zip code and adjust for individual (age at birth, education, insurance status, parity, infant sex, and the year and season of conception) and neighborhood covariates (measure of racial segregation and proportion of households with incomes below the federal poverty line). We will assess effect modification by birth parent race and country of birth because aggressive policing is conceptualized as a racialized stressor.