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Police Brutality And Racial Profiling

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Police Brutality and Racial Profiling This paper will aim to show how racial imbalance continues to play a central role in police brutality in the United States. Minorities have alleged human rights violations by police more often than white residents. To prove this I will be discussing how African Americans are more likely to be stopped out of unjustifiable suspicion by analyzing a study of 1.3 million stops made over 12 years by the Charlotte- Mecklenburg Police Department. This leads to confrontations and the outcome is frisks, searches and tickets which could have been avoided. When minorities do not cooperate out of their anger from being victimized, the police do not respond well and end up using excessive force. They are getting disproportionally …show more content…

Events that took place like the enslavement of Black people have society believing that since it is a part of the country’s history, it can continue to shape social relations today. The problem is no one acknowledges the racial inequality for the reason that it is seen as a normative. Studies show that even 5 in 10 white Americans acknowledge the racial imbalance of our system (Hill 2015). However not many speak out on it because racism is so deeply rooted into society. After many of these police shootings, researchers concluded that when white police officers approach black men out of suspicion based on their biased opinion, they are not approaching these men from a place of intentional racism or differential treatment. They may genuinely aim to to treat everyone the same. However, since the psychology of racism is deeply embedded within all our minds, police officers read people of colour as criminals without knowing they are. When looking at police brutality and race cases, it is often impossible to know the police officer had racial intentions for sure. Regardless, the actions they decided to take are borne out of racism. When these fatal shootings emerge in courts where white police officers are charged with shooting unarmed African Americans, these officers are often freed under the pressure of white supremacy. The fear …show more content…

The study about police stops that was conducted by Frank Baumgartner thoroughly showed how real discrimination is. Traffic stops should be completely fair and police officers should have a reason for why they demand a search and not use their biased opinion about a black driver passing by. However, this is not the case and that is a problem. Stopping black drivers randomly upsets them and creates frisks that could have been ignored if police officers simply did not target the black community. Frisks unfortunately lead to the use of force and police officers are proven to use force more than twice as often against black drivers and passengers as whites (Gordon 2015). Case such as the murder of Michael Brown gives communities further reason to be afraid of police. Young black men were nine times more likely than other Americans to be killed by police officers last year and a final tally of 1,134 deaths at the hands of law enforcement officers has been recorded for this year already (Swaine 2016). When multiple incidents of police misconduct and use of more than necessary force that results in the death of an innocent victim, society being anti-cop is understandable. The notion of innocent until proven guilty is what society believes in and when that is unclear in these cases it is hard to put trust into

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