Police Brutality
Hello everyone! For my civic engagement project, I
will be focusing on a social issue that impacts many people of different races,
ethnicities, and ages. The issue that I will be communicating with everyone is
the issue of police brutality. This topic is important to me because I have
witnessed some of my closest friends face discrimination and harassment by
police officers. Most victims of police brutality, not including African
Americans but also Hispanics and other ethnic groups, come from poor and
low-income families.
What is police brutality?
Encyclopedia Britannica defines police brutality as “the
unwarranted or excessive and often illegal use of force against civilians by
police officers. Forms of police brutality have ranged from assault and battery
to mayhem, torture, and murder.”
There are racial disparities when it comes to police
brutality. According to Mapping Police Violence, Black people are three times
more likely to be killed by police than white people. Black people were killed at 4.117x the rate of white people while Hispanic people were killed at 1.898x the rate of white people in the Los Angeles area. Police killed 1,147 people in 2017 and black people were 25% of those killed despite being only 13% of the population. I believe that certain steps
need to be taken in order to decrease the rate and bring awareness to police brutality.
Key Findings (Data provided by https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/):
- 26% of U.S. police killings between January 2013 - December 2018 were committed by police departments of the 100 largest U.S. cities.
- Black people were 38% of people killed by these 100 police departments despite being only 21% of the population in their jurisdictions.
- Only 1 of the 100 largest city police departments did not kill anyone from Jan 2013 - Dec 2018 (Irvine, CA).
- 46% of unarmed people killed by the 100 largest city police departments were black. These police departments killed unarmed black people at a rate 4 times higher than unarmed white people.
- Rates of violent crime in cities did not make it any more or less likely for police departments to kill people. For example, Buffalo and Newark police departments had relatively low rates of police violence despite high crime rates while Spokane and Orlando had relatively low crime rates and high rates of police violence.
Possible solutions to prevent Police Brutality:
- Require officers to exhaust all means before resorting to shooting
- Require use of all force to be reported
- Ban the use of chokeholds and strangleholds
- Require de-escalation
- Duty to intervene if another officer uses excessive force
- Restrict shooting at moving vehicles
- Warn before shooting
Community members:
"Police brutality has been going on for a very long time. I'm 35 now but I remember when I was 19, an African American friend of mine was pulled over for no reason when I was in the car with him and some other of my friends. The officer looked like he was trying to aggravate my friend but my friend was composed throughout the whole time and just gave him a warning. It was one of the scariest things that has happened to me and made me aware of the issue that is going on today."
- Ignacia Salas
"I believe that police brutality is a serious issue that is going on today. There are too many innocent lives lost just because they do a certain movement that is deemed like an officer's life is in danger or simply due to the color of one's skin".
-Chuong Le (no image)
"Police brutality has been talked about a lot in the news recently and it is making me fear for my life whenever I get pulled over by an officer. Sometimes I worry too much what types of movements I should use when an officer asks me for my license and registration. I believe thinking like that makes me afraid if I look too suspicious to the officer."
-Alan Tran (no image)
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