FUTURE PHYSICIAN LEADERS

By Ayomide Ojebuoboh, MD-PhD Year 2

It’s Time to Reimagine Public Safety and Medicine’s Role

“Have you heard from your brother? I’ve been trying him since last night.” As I woke up in the morning, I began reading these worried messages from my mother. As our concern slowly grew, we began trouble shooting all the possible ways to find my brother who was living in another state. My mother was so anxious that she left work in the morning and many concerned questions began spinning in my mind:

Should we call the police? Well, if we call the police, they may arrive and then shoot him since he’s a Black man.

When I find his address, who could I get to check his place?

My friends are working and busy in NYC but calling the police is not an option. We felt like we were reaching a dead end but finally a little over an hour later, we received a phone call from my brother who mentioned that he slept early the night before and simply overslept that morning. We were relieved but this situation was a sad reminder that the current systems for public safety continue to fall short when it comes to caring for Black, brown and Native individuals because in reality, if a loved one is missing, we have nowhere to go. During this frantic moment with my family, I began thinking about the stories shared by Black women and informants while I was working as a research assistant in Dr. Brittany Lewis’ Research in Action firm. That summer, I helped with the Missing and Murdered African American Women project which was focused on examining the violence against African American women in Minnesota. During this experience, it was evident that public safety systems were more violent than beneficial and the women were bringing up similar concerns that I had when my mom and I were trying to find my brother. However, it was extremely telling that during these interviews, although individuals were bringing up the violence of the police department, they were also bringing up the violence of another system—the medical system. From Black women more than 3.5 times likely to die giving childbirth to the presence of law enforcement in the hospital increasing emotional distress for patients in combination with the stories from the research interviews, it’s evident that the violence from police officers are no different than nor separate from the violence of the medical system. This makes me wonder: What would it look like for those of us in medicine to reimagine what it looks like to support public safety initiatives supported by and created for the community? For example, in Minnesota, how could hospitals connect with individuals at Relationships Evolving Possibilities which provides emergency care to community members like conflict de-escalation and mental health crises and support or Men in Black Security, a de-escalation organization run by Black people that provides security services instead of allowing the default to be partnering with the Minneapolis Police Department? These are the questions that those of us in medicine need to ask because although medicine is not under the scope of public safety it is still complicit with violence from departments of public safety. Overall, public safety is far from being a place of “safety” for many Black, brown, and Native individuals. So, my question for those in medicine is the following: Will we continue to turn a blind eye to the violence of these systems of public safety or will we choose to reimagine public safety and be honest regarding our association with these systems of violence in order to truly be a healing profession for the people?

References 1. Marian F. MacDorman et al., “Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Maternal

Mortality in the United States Using Enhanced Vital Records, 2016-17,”

American Journal of Public Health 111, no. 9 (2021): 1673-81. 2. https://healthydebate.ca/2021/08/topic/police-presence-in-health-care/. 3. https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1516047113 the medical system is not the main space of healing for Black patients.