Medical Student Response to Ferguson: Committing to Action and Calling for Change

The following is a statement to be signed by medical students and physicians in response to the recent epidemic of violence evidenced by recent incidents in Ferguson and New York. It has been authored by Medical Students from the University of Pennsylvania, but may be signed by any medical student or physician that finds it appropriate. 

We ask that you use your medical email address if possible so that we may have count of the amount of medical professionals.

To Whom It May Concern,

As medical students and physicians, we and our colleagues across the nation are dedicated to the health and well-being of our communities. During our matriculation and graduation from medical school, we recited an oath to “practice our art in uprightness and honor” and “hold ourselves aloof from wrong and from corruption,” but as the events in Ferguson reverberate, our declaration, this oath, rings hollow.

The murder of Michael Brown is one of the latest cases in an epidemic of police brutality perpetrated against communities of color across our nation. At last count, Black youth between the ages of 15 and 19 were 21 times more likely to die at the hands of police than their white counterparts. Communities of color are under additional assault from racially biased laws, policing, and judicial systems that have resulted in incarceration rates that are unprecedented in world history. As the United States wrestles with a dark legacy of state-supported violence in Black, Latino, and Native American communities, physicians and students have a responsibility to make ourselves heard.

Physicians are well-aware that it is impossible to address individual health without simultaneously addressing societal health. For example, the American Academy of Pediatrics supports funding for literacy initiatives, while the American Academy of Family Physicians offers opinions on the allocation of federal agriculture spending and nutrition. Now, as an increasingly militarized police force and a prejudicial legal system threaten the lives of people of color, where is our voice?

Many of this nation’s greatest academic hospitals lie within a stone’s throw of communities where the citizenry suffer routine harassment, assault, and murder at the hands of police, and where large segments of the population are deprived of their freedom and rights by disproportionate incarceration. When our nation’s most powerful medical institutions fail to confront the dire effects of police brutality and mass incarceration on the lives and livelihoods of Black communities, we become complicit in perpetuating this violence.

Confronting systemic racism and its effects is challenging, but that is no excuse for inaction. We propose the following steps to begin to counter and eliminate systemic racism: First, we call for expansion of funding to analyze and eliminate both unconscious racial bias in medical decision-making and structural disparities in access to medical care. Second, we call for pediatricians and emergency room physicians in particular to speak and act against the effects of racism, violence, and police brutality in communities of color. Environmental threats like guns in the home and bullying at school are among the concerns of pediatricians, but in response to the threat of police brutality and criminalization, pediatricians are deafeningly silent. Likewise, emergency room physicians are often the first point of contact between victims of police brutality and the medical system, but in the midst of an epidemic of violence, they have taken no organized action. Though emergency room physicians and pediatricians are on the front lines of this epidemic, physicians of all specialties and fields must play a role in disrupting violence against communities of color. Finally, we call for the medical establishment to condemn the “vascular hold” as a police tactic. In the recent death of Eric Garner, the officer may have attempted a non-lethal “vascular hold” that shifted into a lethal “choke hold” resulting in Mr. Garner’s death. A “non-lethal” technique that carries significant risk of death for the citizens that officers are sworn to “protect and serve” has no place within any officer’s arsenal.

The actions above are only first steps in the work of dismantling the effects of racism on medical practice and within communities of color. We refuse to watch quietly as our profession’s dedication to the preservation of human life is desecrated. We call on all American medical institutions and professional associations to publicly condemn racism, police brutality, and mass incarceration. Until we speak out against violence against communities of color, our silence speaks for us.

Respectfully,
Committed Medical Students and Physicians