Victim or Villain? Racial/Ethnic Differences in News Portrayals of Individuals with Mental Illness Killed by Police

Abstract

A revised version of this working paper is forthcoming in The Sociological Quarterly. This paper is not the copy of record and does not exactly replicate the final, authoritative version of the article. Please do not copy or cite without permission of the author. As a social problem, little is known about how individuals are portrayed in the news when race/ethnicity and mental illness intersect. This is important because of the ability of news to influence perceptions and policies about mental illness across race/ethnicity. This article examines how individuals with mental illness who were killed by police during 2015 and 2016 were portrayed in the news. Content analysis of 301 online news articles indicates that stereotypes associated with mental illness were differentially applied by race/ethnicity. Findings have implications for public attitudes about mental illness across race/ethnicity.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 10 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.