Police Brutality In America Essay

Police brutality has been a problem in America since slavery ended. In Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech in 1963 he said “We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality.” Now in 2016 many African Americans think nothing has changed.

In an article written by Linn Washington Jr. she said that in a report in 1968 with problems of police brutality Lyndon B Johnson panel or the Kerner Commission said that most minorities feel the police are an occupying force that makes people fear them and not a feeling of security. In March 2015 President Barack Obama panel had almost the same thing to say that Police where considered an occupying force that come from other communities to rule the minority community which means that the police aren’t building relationships and trust in the community. The reason that police brutality hasn’t changed is that whites might think it’s a problem. In an article by Michael Minkoff he said that “The problem is not with the

But in a poll from Gallup in 2000 38% of people agreed that police brutality existed and it occurred in their area. But in a report from Harvard students had a report that between 1960 and 2011" blacks risk for being killed by police has ranged from 5 to 19 times higher than whites" they also reported that a lack of data from the early police killings has shown that police brutality looks like it's going down. Since then though the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 has collected data on excessive force of police. Though even reporting the data may be a problem since a study from the uniform Crime reporting program showed that from "1976 to 1988 found that national systems underreport justifiable homicides by police" showing that police know they're in the wrong and don't always