The (in)visible wounds of over-policing and racial trauma

For many across Canada and the diaspora, interactions with law enforcement are a source of racial trauma that shapes mental health and the ability to thrive. Over-policing and systemic racial profiling extract a serious psychological cost from Black and racialized communities, one that compounds across a lifetime and touches every dimension of daily life, from how we move through public spaces to how we raise our children to navigate the world.

In Toronto, Black residents are subjected to twice as many police enforcement actions as other groups, and officers are significantly more likely to use force against Black individuals. Across the Atlantic, Black children in England and Wales are almost eight times more likely to be strip-searched by police than their white peers. These numbers represent a continuous cycle of stress and fear inflicted upon communities already navigating systemic barriers in housing, employment, and healthcare, and we should continue to treat over-policing as the public health issue it is.

Race-based traumatic stress is the psychological distress that occurs when individuals from marginalized groups are exposed to race-related stressors, including direct discrimination and the vicarious trauma of witnessing violence against others in their community. What makes racial trauma distinct from other forms of psychological injury is that it accumulates over time, building with every unwarranted stop and search, every news report of police brutality, and every moment spent navigating a society where one’s existence is treated with suspicion. That accumulation has measurable consequences, as research links chronic racial stress directly to depression, generalized anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder, and its effects show up in the classroom, the workplace, and the body long after any single encounter has passed.

Augustine Obeng RSW, MSW (ITR), a registered social worker, therapist, educator, author, and founder of Poetic Therapy, has spent over two decades supporting Black and Indigenous communities through trauma-informed, culturally responsive care, and he speaks to this issue with both clinical authority and lived community knowledge.

“The over-policing of BIPOC people in Toronto, the GTA, and beyond is a serious concern,” he says. “It begs the question: are Black and Brown bodies exclusively engaging in deviant behaviour, or are marginalized communities overpoliced and criminalized, which is why they are disproportionately impacted by the justice system?”

Obeng also points to a precarious gap in how this crisis is measured and understood, arguing that race-based statistics are essential for quantifying the harm that institutions and systems in the Canadian context inflict on Afrodiasporic people, and that the communities bearing this burden carry a richness and complexity that resist easy categorization.

Addressing this crisis requires a fundamental shift in how we understand the relationship between policing and public health. Over-policing is a determinant of health, and the structural inequalities that permit racial profiling to persist demand comprehensive policy responses rather than incremental adjustments. Culturally responsive mental health services that validate the experiences of Afrodiasporic individuals and provide meaningful tools for healing from racial trauma require serious and sustained investment, as do the community-led organizations that have long been doing this work without adequate support from the systems that created the harm in the first place.

The resilience of Black and racialized communities in the face of this ongoing harm is well documented, but the burden of resilience should never have fallen on those being harmed. Recognizing the psychological wounds inflicted by over-policing is where meaningful advocacy begins, toward a society where safety and mental well-being are not distributed along racial lines, and where the communities most affected by these policies have real power to shape the solutions. That future depends on a willingness to confront these realities and demand change that goes beyond rhetoric.