Sometimes police are put in situations that excessive force is needed. Some officers use these extreme measures in situations when it is not needed, police brutality should be addressed by testing police for for racial bias, require more training, and use body cameras. Bias is the favoring of or against one thing, person or group compared with another. Most of us have bias towards certain things and a lot of people do not even know that they do. The most common people have forms of bias and that includes police officers.
In the black community, there have been many questionable incidents between police officers and black citizens. An officer might approach an African American who broke the law differentially than a White American based on their own discretion. Whereby an officer would hesitate to immediately arrest a white person for breaking the same law, they would handle the arrest of a black person differently. This is problematic: Police discretion impacts the way the society views the criminal justice system by having too much range on enforcing the law. Time and time again we see this being the case in relation to black America.
There are numerous issues that deal with the American criminal justice system, but the two I found most prominant that occur on a daily basis is the abuse from police officers and clear racism shown by the American criminal justice system. To begin, racism as we know is a prejudice directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one’s own race is superior. In the criminal justice system African Americans are directly targeted and punished in a higher more aggressive way, than say someone who is caucasian and committed the same exact crime. Racism is more often than not, the motive for official misconduct. There are examples of racism from every known region in the United States, spanning across centuries from slavery to
Blacks are astronomically affected by the Police force, having them wonder if they are truly protected in this country. America is supposed to be the country of the free and brave, but police brutality has forced Blacks to view the police task negatively. This creates even more tension and division between each party which only increases the prejudice and violence police convey. Police brutality is a countless cycle of inflicting violence upon citizens and targeting African Americans. Police Brutality is referring to the use of unnecessary or inordinate use of force from a Police officer towards a civilian.
The researchers collected data from the President's Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice and for the Police Services Study (PSS) which came from 24 jurisdictions in New York, Missouri, and Florida. Findings indicated moderately strong evidence for the threat hypothesis. The presence of minorities considered as threats to safety and peace predicted higher police brutality complaints (Smith & Holmes, 2003). This research supports the findings of Carbado (2016) that in communities where minorities are both considered as threats and which have numerous interactions with the police, aggression by the police force is higher too. Police officers who see
Additionally, many citizens believe law enforcement officers handle cases differently based on an individual’s age, gender, race, or et cetera. Due to some police officers using their power to unconstitutionally punish a citizen, these situations result in harmful incidents due to it being mishandled. In result of officers mishandling a simple situation violently, these incidents raised awareness in today’s culture and community. Law enforcement officers' duty is to protect citizens, not harm them; and officers should not be putting any citizens' lives in harm's way. Police brutality causes fear in many citizens of today’s
The lynching (hanging) of black people was common in 1930s America and The Ku Klux Klan still had a lot of power. Black people wanted to change the way they were treated but it was very difficult for them to do this as a result of the Jim Crow Laws, these were a number of laws in America enforced between 1876 and 1965 that provided a legal basis
Some may argue that cops who are pulling people over for “small” crimes like a broken tail light or slightly overspeeding is what causes more police brutality, but if a cop pulls a person over for a broken tail light, and they gets out of the car with a weapon, is the cop really racist in that scenario? Or is the cop simply protecting himself and others around them? Racism in the police force is virtually nonexistent. I can agree that certain individuals will be racist, but one cop being racist in an entire department of cops does not mean there is an institutionalized issue, and can be cared for much easier; fire the
My community problem is in relation to the hate crimes in Soweto, Meadowlands. A hate crime can be identified as “a crime , usually violent, motivated by prejudice or intolerance towards an individual’s national origin, ethnicity, colour, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation or disability” (Dictionary.com, 2015). Hate crimes differentiated from other forms of crime are unlawful crimes that are prejudice-centred towards a specific type of person(s). They also defined as message crimes, implemented as warnings to pursued groups. Examples of these crimes are racial attacks, sexism, arson, homophobia, rape, murder, harassment and hate speech etc.
There had been many attempts to answer this problem, however it is still not solved. This issue, as well as trying to be explained and examined with many other sciences and studies, could be explained with psychology, sociology and social psychology. There are many reasons causing police to use excessive force on black males, and there are many background social or psychological motives pushing them to be more prejudiced and racially profiling. To start with, in his work Police Racial Violence: Lessons From Social Psychology, L. Song Richardson argues that “Implicit Racial Bias and Implicit White Favorism” are counted as one of those reasons. (Richardson, 2015, p.