Latesha Harris (UNC-CH ’25) Publishes New Article on Police Violence and Women’s Health

Latesha K. Harris, BSN, RN, is the first author of “Police Violence and Black Women’s Health,” published in the Journal for Nurse Practitioners. Harris’ article aims to address police violence, a byproduct of structural racism, to create safer and healthier communities. She posits that police violence, a race-related stressor, may negatively impact Black women’s health and advocates for structural changes within police departments, policy, and the nursing workforce.

“Through each project, I am narrowing my scope to specific exposures and outcomes that are both timely and innovative.”

Harris is a first-year PhD student and a Hillman Scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Nursing. Her work builds on her undergraduate research project where she examined psychosocial factors, such as racism, discrimination, neighborhood stress, and cardiovascular disease risk factors among young African American women (age 18-24 years). That project earned her highest honors and University Distinction when she graduated with her Bachelor of Science in Nursing. Harris extended this work with an Interdisciplinary Inquiry grant from the Rita and Alex Hillman Foundation, “Exploring the Influence of Police Violence on Population Health and Health Inequities within Historically Oppressed Populations.” This grant allowed her to attend interdisciplinary courses at Columbia University and the Odum Institute at UNC-Chapel Hill in the summer of 2021. Harris and her mentor, Yamnia Cortés, Ph.D., MPH, FNP-BC, FAHA, will continue to examine the association between police violence and cardiometabolic risk among African American women—a high-risk population for cardiovascular disease for her dissertation.

Read the article here.

Citation: Harris, LK., Cortés, YI. (2022). Police Violence and Black Women’s Health. Journal for Nurse Practitioners. The Journal for Nurse Practitioners. Doi: 10.1016/j.nurpra.2022.02.014. NIHMS: 1780307.