Everyone wants to end up successful, right? Success is the only way to achieve great things with your time on this planet full of opportunities. One must have an education, and acceptable personality and make the correct decisions to create those opportunities. Fear governs critical choices in everyday life. Mistrust and fear of authority causes citizens to possess a disinclination to call the police for help.
This reasoning best explains why African Americans are most targeted for crimes, despite that police officers are armed and told to make more charges on the entire public. “What caused Brown to be shot at least six times was […] the fact that for much of recent history of this country, Black people have bought into the nonsense that we live in a post racial America. That because of the election of Barack Obama as President, racism and the wounds it brings no longer exists” (Baaith). Yet Ferguson has brought the subject of racism back into clear view, and with this information, we as a society can begin to understand it on a deeper
The severity of racial profiling is very concerning. As proven by numerous texts studied for this Expository Writing class, it is evident that the Black respondents of Otis Johnson’s poll, analyzing citizens’ relationships with the police, are not the only Black people that: “expressed far less confidence than whites in local police to treat both races equally” (Johnson). In White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack, Peggy McIntosh describes various privileges which sound ordinary, though surprisingly only White people have. Among them, is one that affects all people on a daily basis: “If a traffic cop pulls me over or if the IRS audits my tax return, I can be sure I haven’t been singled out because of my race” (McIntosh). Governmental
How would one feel if he were discriminated against only because the context in which he was in makes it “reasonable” to do so? Some may say that our lives revolve around our own judgements and therefore it is necessary to take every possible precaution to ensure our own safeties. However, such action would often result in preconceived opinion and discriminations against races. For this reason, “objectively reasonable fear” is not justified.
My request to you is to stand up against this. Our own personal opinions and racism is clouding our judgment, making us automatically assume the worst. And it is ending innocent lives. Instead of just assuming that a black man is guilty because of his color, prove it. Find real evidence against him, study both sides, and accept all possible conclusions.
Images and video of Eric Garner’s murder by police generated outrage and protests across the nation. Many wept for the loss of this innocent, but for Black America, it was just another offense in a long series of transgressions against the black body. To them, the pain was familiar—they had known it by many names: slavery, Jim Crow, mass incarceration. Police brutality was nothing new. This situation was different, however.
To this end, it would also be a fair assumption that Wilson’s experience in the Ferguson Police Department taught him to react more extreme than was needed in most situations. This is not meant to Monday morning quarterback Wilson’s decision in the moment. But according to Department of Justice investigation of the Ferguson Police Department (2015), the Ferguson Police Department was more focused on revenue than public safety. This culture trickles down to every police officer. In a sense, this became a highly systemic problem.
Addressing police brutality must be done with empathy for and awareness of the plight of the African-American community. Historically speaking, there has not been a period wherein the African-American community was not inhibited by institutionalized barriers. American enslavement provided the foundation for later oppressive provisions that are especially prevalent within inner-city, predominantly Black communities, which, incidentally, many of the prominent instances of police brutality have taken place. Political regimes like the “war on drugs,” “school to prison pipeline,” and mass incarceration criminalize and dehumanize the African-American community, and thus affect the collective mindset of the population. I believe that an imperative first step that has not been taken is acknowledging the effects these may have on the Black community.
Instead the police often challenge black people for walking or driving. This leaves the communities frightened of police rather than feeling supported. In society today, the fear and violence in which the author lived when growing up in Baltimore still continue on. The growing media coverage of police brutality and racial injustice in the United States can be described as “An Event”. Because of all these issues taking place, many in society are becoming psychologically impacted never forgetting the events they have experienced.
Police brutality stands declared as a controversial issue, since it perceptible nationwide. I don’t consider this partisanship limited to the judgment of pigment, because statistics prove otherwise. In 2015 alone, the
It seems that the officers who fear black males, as the study presented before suggests, are allowed to shoot their weapons out of fear because the courts are protecting them. It is a police officer’s duty to be brave and not to act out of fear, but it seems as if the officers that are involved in killing these unarmed black men are only acting out of fear. There are so many cases where officers are acquitted or their charges are dropped. This has to do with the absence of video evidence and every police officer claiming that they were acting in
In Table 2, they gathered data on racial differences facing the police. One of the questions they asked was “Just your impression, are blacks in your community treated less fairly than whites in dealing with the police, such as traffic incidents?” Table 1 and Table 2 together supported racial splits on their personal thoughts and conflicts with the police. Another one of Weitzer and Tuch findings were that 39% of blacks had unfavorable views about their local police than 12.8% of whites and 30.3% of blacks had unfavorable views of the state police than 7.7% whites (2002). Their findings show that blacks see profiling as more pervasive, with 81.6% of blacks feeling this way versus 60.2% of whites (Weitzer
These motives have led to street interactions between the police and African Americans that have reached a level of distrust based on his up growing. According to Chancy and Robertson, “Negrophobia can be surmised as an irrational of blacks, which includes a fear of being victimized by blacks, that can result in whites shooting or harming an African American based on criminal/racial stereotypes.” They then use this to justify the killings of unarmed African Americans based on them being black and fearing for their lives. Police officers are killing African Americans every other day and some are getting away with it; even in states where officers have to wear body cams and
However, research demonstrates that often times men of color are treated harshly which leads to negative perceptions of police officers. Police brutality is a crime that is has been surfacing in the news recently. Some people are just starting to realize that these injustices against the black community really occur, while others are well aware. The recent shootings, different run-ins with officers being filmed while doing such harmful actions against African American men is an example of police brutality and, that reminds us that as a society work needs to be done to improve police and community relations. A black male cannot even walk down the street on a cold night because he might be a suspect from something or he may be of danger to the people around.
An occurrence observed by the population of Los Angeles, California conveys the existence of racism and police brutality. According to The Polls-Trends: Racial Differences in Attitudes Toward the Police, “…three quarters of blacks, but only 38 percent of whites, continued to view police brutality as a common occurrence” (Tuch and Weitzer