The effect of police violence on African Americans is studied in two new studies: one links police-involved deaths to sleep disorders and the other focuses on finding a racial gap in injuries related to police use of Tasers or weapons Similar.

The effects of police violence on Black health “should be documented as a critical first step in reducing these harms,” three editors of JAMA Internal Medicine wrote in an editorial published Monday alongside the studies.

For the sleep study, researchers analyzed responses from more than two million people from 2013 to 2019 in two large government surveys. They focused on people’s reports of sleep in the six months following police killings of unarmed black people, which between those years amounted to 331 cases.

Thanks to the results, the researchers found a common pattern, without difference in age, sex, education or other factors, of sleep disturbances among black people, which was based on sleeping less than six hours. In contrast, no pattern was found among white people.

In the case of murders that had media exposure that attracted national attention, such as the deaths of Eric Garner and Tamir Rice, the insomnia effect had an 11.4% increase in reports with the average of all black people surveyed . And for deaths, known or unknown, that occurred in the same state as the respondent, the effect increased by 6.5%.

“Discrimination can manifest itself in many ways, one of which is unequal exposure to police use of force,” said Dr. Atheendar Venkataramani of the University of Pennsylvania, who led the study. Poor sleep can increase “the risk of suffering from a number of diseases throughout life, as well as the risk of premature death.”

The second study found racial disparities in injuries that occurred when police used Tasers and similar weapons to incapacitate people. Data from 1,276 emergency department visits from October 2019 to December 2020 were used to perform this analysis.

Nearly 36% of those injured were black people, well above the 13.6% of the general US population. Whites accounted for 39% of those injured, Hispanics 17.6%, Native Americans 2%, and Asian/Pacific Islanders 1.4%. Injuries included puncture wounds, concussions, fractures and traumatic brain injuries.

The devices are known to cause falls, but investigators could not say whether police used the weapons incorrectly or the exact role of the weapons in the injuries. “It’s really important to make sure that law enforcement officers receive proper training on how to use these devices and minimize the risk of long-term injury,” said study co-author Kevin Griffith of Vanderbilt University.