Beyond the Manuscript: Book Discussion: From Enforcers to Guardians: A Public Health Primer on Ending Police Violence
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Beyond the Manuscript: Book Discussion: From Enforcers to Guardians:A Public Health Primer on Ending Police Violence
Welcome to Progress in Community Health Partnerships' latest episode of our Beyond the Manuscript podcast. In each volume of the Journal, the editors select one article for our Beyond the Manuscript post-study interview with the authors. Beyond the Manuscript provides the authors the opportunity to tell listeners what they would want to know about the project beyond what went into the final manuscript.
In this episode of Beyond the Manuscript, Associate Editor, Vanessa de Danzine interviews Mindy Fullilove one of the authors of the recently published book, From Enforcers to Guardians: A Public Health Primer on Ending Police Violence.
This episode of Beyond the Manuscript is going to be an interview by the reviewer of a new book by Hannah Cooper and Mindy Fullilove, entitled From Enforcers to Guardians: A Public Health Primer on Ending Police Violence, published by the Johns Hopkins University Press this year. I am Hal Strelnick, the co-editor in chief of Progress in Community Health Partnerships, and I am going to introduce our associate editor, Vanessa De Danzine, who will interview Dr. Fullilove about her new book. Vanessa?
Yes. Good morning. Welcome and thank you for making the time for this podcast. My name is Vanessa de Danzine. I am a retired detective with the New York City Police Department, the past chair of the Community Based Public Health Caucus, Director of the Community Based Organization Partners Brooklyn Chapter and an Associate Editor for the Journal Progress in Community Health Partnership. With me today is Dr. Mindy Thompson Fullilove, one of two authors for the book entitled From Enforcers to Guardian: A Public Health Primer on Ending Police Violence. I am eager to get started to this very much needed dialogue. But first, can you please share something about yourself and your background?
Lovely to meet you. And hi, Hal, who was my teacher when I was in residency. So I am a psychiatrist. I trained at New York Hospital Westchester Division and also at Montefiore for my last year. That is how I met Hal and got connected to all the good people there. So as a psychiatrist I practiced for a few years, then went into research during the AIDS epidemic in 1986. So I have been doing research ever since, looking at problems of really communities that had been ransacked for all their resources and were left to suffer the ravages of health that follow that. I live in New Jersey, where I am currently sheltering in place, and I am on faculty at the New School as a professor of Urban Policy and Health.
Awesome. When I think about policing, I see that police violence and police brutality has been embedded in the fabric of our system's history. But the climax today has led to ongoing civil unrest, not just nationally but also has become a global movement. So why was it important now to write this [End Page 521] book today if we've had these issues for centuries and were there any challenges faced when writing this book?
While we were writing the book the last 2 years and it was published in January, so it was issued before this moment of unrest. But certainly it was sort of in the aftermath of Treyvon Martin's killing and the emergence of Black Lives Matter. And we both thought that a primer that would say these are some of the basics that was addressed to the public health community would be useful. Our book is not—we're not criminal—I am certainly not somebody who works in criminal justice. I work in public health. And so saying to the public health community from our perspective these are what the issues look like and this is the contribution we could make was something that I thought was really important.
Great, thank you. In the book you mentioned the magic strategy as a multifactorial tool to shift what you...
