Consulting Associates and Postdoctoral Fellows with Duke National Clinician Scholars Program Dominique Bulgin, PhD '19, Gillian Adynski and Rachele Lipsky contributed to the guest editorial entitled "Nurses should oppose police violence and unjust policing in healthcare" published in the International Journal of Nursing Studies.

Excerpt

Nurses Should Oppose Unjust Policing

As nurses in the United States (US) with an ethical obligation to promote public health, we strongly oppose police brutality against Black Americans. We stand against the 8:46-minute killing of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota; the ambush and murder of Breonna Taylor while she slept in her home in Louisville, Kentucky without any subsequent police accountability; the civilian hunting and killing of Ahmaud Arbery and complicit police cover-up in Glynn County, Georgia; as well as countless other instances of publicly witnessed police brutality against unarmed Black Americans. These acts are rooted in a long, violent history of racism in policing that originated in slavery and organized control of Black Americans (Potter, 2013). As the world has witnessed unjustified, persistent assaults upon Black Americans, health professionals and global communities-at-large are calling for dismantling and defunding police departments that advance a legacy of racism.

Nurses should be active participants in this movement while also confronting our profession’s relationship to systems of policing (American Academy of Nursing, 2020). Nursing is one of many health professions that has a history of participation in racist profiling of patients, unnecessary and excessive restraint and detention, and other forms of inhumane treatment in healthcare towards the Black patients we claim to serve (Barbee, 1993; Bennett et al., 2019; Cottingham et al., 2018; Smith, 2020). These systems of patient policing in healthcare are fundamentally violent, racist, and antithetical to nursing’s ethical contract with the public (JeeLyn Garcia & Zulfacar, 2015). While supporting calls to defund and dismantle unjust law enforcement policing systems, nurses must take parallel action to dismantle systems of unjust policing in healthcare (American Public Health Association, 2018; Black Lives Matter, 2020). The healthcare ideal of “safety” is often a justification for violence and control, especially of Black patients. Nurses can promote patient well-being through non-violent, non-punitive means by re-imagining systems of policing inside and outside of healthcare towards restorative and transformative justice.