Racialised Police Violence and States’ Obligation to Respect the Human Right to the Social, Psychosocial and Environmental Determinants of Mental Health

Violence-based policing is increasing world-wide, is highly racialised, and poses severe risks to the mental health of everyone living in the communities routinely subjected to it, including future generations. We argue that:
(1) Violence-based policing violates the human right of every person to enjoy the social conditions necessary to realise their highest attainable standard of mental health (i.e. the social determinants of mental health).

(2) The right to the social determinants of mental health is a justiciable right, which States are obligated to respect, protect, and fulfil under widely ratified international human rights treaties.

(3) States are rarely held to account for failure to mitigate social conditions that are known to pose serious risks to mental health even when those risk factors are a direct result of racialised state policies.

(4) To advance a more inclusive implementation of the right to health, international human rights monitoring bodies should require States to provide disaggregated data on the impact of violence-based policing on enjoyment of the social determinants of mental health using criteria such as race, gender, age, income and neighbourhood.

(5) This data could be used by civil society as an additional argument in support of existing campaigns against violence-based policing and to further transformative change towards racial justice and equality in the enjoyment of the right to health.

We draw on the example of militarised policing of favela communities in Brazil to support our argument; but the argument is relevant to violence-based policing in all countries.