The Problem Of Police Brutality And Racial Profiling

Police brutality and racial profiling has always been a conflicting, and a long debated problem. The number of African-American males being killed or the number of African-American males facing excessive force by the law enforcement because of their skin color is rapidly growing throughout the years. Especially after the recent events that took many lives of young African-American people in the last couple of years in the United States, approximately 920 in 2015 alone, this became a very popular issue again, and caused unrest throughout the entire world. The chance of a black unarmed male getting killed is more than twice compared to a white individual. 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. 2962.) According to Richardson, police associate some body characteristics with crime, such as dark skin, big nose and full lips. So when an African-American male