Police Brutality

Black Lives Matter

The purpose of our group research is to see how factors such as, racial bias and police misconduct affect people. Through social media and the local news we have seen many cases where people of color are the ones it affects the most. Some major cases such as the death of Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and Trayvon Martin fueled a fire that started a movement called Black Lives Matter. It began to shed light on racial profiling, systemic racism, and racial inequality. Even though Trayvon Martin did not get shot by the police, the Black Lives Movement still made an protest about him. The Black Lives Matter organization fights to bring justice for those who have been gunned down by law enforcement and to avoid future incidents. The article, “When Police Officers Exceed Their Authority: The Applicability of Domestic Terrorism to Police Officers.” talks about the Black Lives Movement. Lopez, M. V, the author says that Police officers shoot and kill civilians on a regular basis, and that the public demands more criminal punishment should be ensured on the officers for their crime, so the The Black Lives Matter movement began to make headlines in the fall of 2014 and was focused on drawing attention to police brutality.

Brain Chama, author of The Black Lives Matter Movement, Crime and Police Brutality believes that the movement has inspired a new generation of activists who are able to critically analyze the historical and contemporary ravages of racism, persistent structural inequality, mass incarceration, police brutality and high levels of black unemployment, and reignite a broader push for black liberation(203). Unfortunately, the Black Lives Matter organization receives a lot of backlash. It is said that the work they are doing and publicizing is actually triggering the police instead of making a difference. Chama reports, "The movement statistics are often questioned and mocked regularly and it is often perceived to be a cancer damaging police reputation (206). So that leads us to question who is right? Are police officers targeting African Americans or not? We will found out in our research.

Who is being targeted?

When looking for information on police brutality we have no intention on saying all police officers are bad or racist, we are simply looking for information on why these things happen and what causes them to happen. Not all shootings were made out of hate, some of these were made by terrible mistake and we want to get to the bottom of fatal police shootings. When we searched police brutality on the web everything that was coming up was violence against African Americans, without even having type a race in the search bar. So of course that raises some eyebrows and makes it somewhat clear that police and violence against African Americans are quite a common topic.

A website called mappingpoliceviolence.org. has chartings and logs of police violence and percentages. On the website, authors Mckesson, Sinyangwe, and Cummingham found that African Americans are three times more likely to be killed by police than white people. In 2015, 30% of black victims who were shot and killed were unarmed at the time of death. We also found, that of a thousand people killed by police 10% of them were unarmed. Some findings show that wearing a hoodie which is called “the hoodie effect” or reaching into a pocket are reasons why some of these killings happen.

This has become a rising issue in today’s society because law enforcement officials our individuals that the community should be able to look up to instead of fearing them.

The hoodie effect is one of the causes of the shootings. The hoodie effect is when an individual is wearing a hood that covers there face and all features that help someone see what they look like. Jones says that “the persons wearing hoodies may be dangerous especially if found in an area they are unexpected to be in”(Jones 872-882). We found that 10% of 1000 people killed each year were unarmed (Jones 872-882). When looking for information we found that persons of color were shot and killed more than any other race. Young black men are nine times more likely to be killed by police officers (Alang et al. 662-664). For example Jones found that of 94 fatal shootings in 2017 of these fatal shootings 40% were African American.

There is an article "The More Things Change, the More Things Stay the Same: Race, Ethnicity, and Police Brutality" by Alang S., '"stated that present-day policing echoes the role of patrollers who were paid to monitor and often harm Black people during the era of enslavement (Alang p14)." "Today, it is no longer an issue of being suspected of a runaway slave, it is just being suspected, whether it is sleeping in the dorms at a university, walking home while wearing a hoodie, or just driving, and being non-white is suspect."

We ask ourselves what is it about the black race that triggers these police officers to target them over another. Sadly, its the stereotypes that are placed upon black men that gives police officers an excuse to react the way they do when dealing with an African American. Shaun Gabiddon author of Criminological Theories on Race and Crime brought up a term called "Negrophobia" which can be defined 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 (Chaney pg.482). Police use that as in excuse saying they reacted out of self defense when all along they were the only dangerous one in that situation because studies have shown that many of the men did not use force when they were being assaulted by the police.

Methods

Data

Discussion

Even if officers seem to abusive their authority, according to the article “When Police Officers Exceed Their Authority: The Applicability of Domestic Terrorism to Police Officers”, stated that there is a defense of qualified immunity that can shield them from civil or criminal suits. The article also states according to Lopez, M. V. that when qualified immunity is not given, then an officer should similarly not receive any immunity for the offense of terrorism because the officer’s conduct was so far beyond the hazy border between excessive and acceptable force that the official had to know he was violating the Constitution.

In our survey we asked a question, “Do you believe police officers should get punished for misconduct when convicted?”, the data that we analyzed we found that 91% said yes, 6% said maybe and 1% said no. The article by Alonso, J. A stated that The Court has treated police use of force as a “seizure” governed only by a reasonableness standard under the Fourth Amendment (16). There are many drawbacks and limitations, the article also stated that, However, the current reasonableness standard seems to allow the “bad seeds” of different police departments to abuse their authority and tarnish the reputation of police officers in general (20). Study from April 2009 to June 2010 done by the National Police Misconduct Statistics and Reporting Project shown that there were 5,986 reports of misconduct, 382 fatalities linked to misconduct, and 33 % of misconduct cases that went through to convictions and 64 % of misconduct cases that received prison sentences. When convicted the average time officers spent in prison was 14 months (Chaney pg. 485). The fact that officers only spend 14 months in prison on average for misconduct is quite sad. Just because they enforce the law does not mean they are above the law. Changes need to be made and officers should be held accountable for the actions.

Conclusion

As far as with the data that we collected, we received the number we expected out of our participants. What could have been done better for the future, is coming up with better questions and find articles that relates to the questions with more data and facts . Also looking at our data with having majority of white people do our survey versus black people. We needed to collect more data from African Americans and with ages 34-54 because they have experiments life more than ages of 18-24. Without sounding uneducated but we needed more African Americans because of the data we collected finding out that African Americans are more likely to experience police brutality versus white people, that white people haven't experienced police brutality like African Americans, therefore with them being majority of the data collected saying that police officers rarely abusive their authority. It just something to know for future person to ask the group who is actually affected by police brutality than a group thats not. Our purpose of this project and the topic was to get a point across on police brutality, we were not trying to make it seem like we were attacking all officers. There are good cops and bad cops, our point was to talk about how police brutality is actually a thing that takes place in our country as it did back in the old times and it still continues till this day. That's when race came into play. From our data we collected above it stated that without even typing in race into the search bar it provided us with information stating that African Americans are more likely to be killed by police officers and majority of them are unarmed. The officers used unnecessary force on the individuals which is defined as police brutality. We collected data and provided feedback, but our research did have some limitations. Some limitations that we came across is that out of 62 respondents only 19 of them were males. Mainly police brutality is done to males so we believe that if more males did the survey the results could have been different. Our results also show that majority of those who completed the survey were White/Caucasian as shown in Figure 1. Not only were most of the participants white they were also between the ages of 18-24. In that age bracket many people most likely haven't seen any forms of police brutality. If we had more participation from other races and older people weighing in on the subject the outcome would be different. In conclusion with the results that we did receive there is no doubt that police brutality in American is not a problem.

Further research on this topic should be about getting more training for officers and teaching them how to react in certain situations. As well as officers should be evaluated mentally throughout their time as an officer to make sure they are fully capable of performing their job. Another thing that should be stressed is when an incident does occur the officer should receive a harsher punishment than what most officers have been given in the past if they were even convicted. Because most times they only get suspended or fired. With such light consequences how is one to believe police officers will truly feel obligated to stop the violence.

Works Cited

Alang, Sirry, et al. “Police Brutality and Black Health: Setting the Agenda for Public Health Scholars.” American Journal of Public Health, vol. 107, no. 5, May 2017, pp. 662–665.https://eds.b.ebscohost.com/eds/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=8& Accessed 28 October 2019

Alang S.”The More Things Change, the More Things Stay the Same: Race, Ethnicity, and Police Brutality”. American Journal of Public Health, vol 108, n 9, p. 1127-1128. <http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx. Accessed 22 Sept. 2019

Alonso, J. A. . “How Police Culture Affects the Way Police Departments View and Utilize Deadly Force Policies under the Fourth Amendment,'' Arizona Law Review, V. 60, n. 4, p. 987–1012, 2018.<http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx . Accessed 11 Sept. 2019

Ajilore, Olugbenga; Shirey, Shane. " Do All lives Matter? An Evaluation of Race and Excessive Use of Force by Police", Atlantic Economic Journal. Jun2017, Vol. 45 Issue 2, p201-212. 12p. DOI: 10.1007/s11293-017-9538-6. https://eds.a.ebscohost.com/eds/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=22&sid=0b4b8eb4-1b57-46aa-8069-2639fd025ca5%40sessionmgr4008. Accessed 15 Oct. 2019.

Billings, Colette. "Remedying Police Brutality in America’s Public Schools Through Private Structural Reform Under 42 U.S.C. § 1983", Texas Journal on Civil Liberties & Civil Rights. 2017, Vol. 23 Issue 1, p55-78. 24p. https://eds.a.ebscohost.com/eds/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=8&sid=0b4b8eb4-1b57-46aa-8069-2639fd025ca5%40sessionmgr4008. Accessed 2 Oct. 2019.

Chama, Brian. "The Black Lives Matter movement, crime and police brutality: Comparative study of New York Post and New York Daily News", European Journal of American Culture. Sep2019, Vol. 38 Issue 3, p201-216. 16p. DOI: 10.1386/ejac_00002_1. https://eds.a.ebscohost.com/eds/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=3&sid=0b4b8eb4-1b57-46aa-8069-2639fd025ca5%40sessionmgr4008. Accessed 5 Oct. 2019.

Chaney, Cassandra; Ray V. Robertson. "Racism and Police Brutality in America", In: Journal of African American Studies. pg.480-505. https://eds.a.ebscohost.com/eds/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=18&sid=0b4b8eb4-1b57-46aa-8069-2639fd025ca5%40sessionmgr4008. Accessed 24 Oct. 2019.

Edwards, Frank, et al. “Risk of Police-Involved Death by Race/Ethnicity and Place, United States, 2012-2018.” American Journal of Public Health, vol. 108, no. 9, Sept. 2018, pp. 1241–1248. https://eds.b.ebscohost.com/eds/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=37&sid=129c9a5a-a6c9-4e44-9c26-be817a624ba2%40pdc-v-sessmgr06. Accessed 28 October 2019

Gingerich, Daniel W., and Virginia Oliveros. “Police Violence and the Underreporting of Crime.” Economics & Politics, vol. 30, no. 1, Mar. 2018, pp. 78–105. https://eds.b.ebscohost.com/eds/detail/detail?vid=25&sid=129c9a5a-a6c9-4e44-9c26-be817a624ba2%40pdc-v-sessmgr06&bdata=JkF1dGhUeXBlPWlwLHNoaWImc2l0ZT1lZHMtbGl2ZSZzY29wZT1zaXRl#AN=127932238&db=bth Accessed 28 October 2019

Jones, James M. “Killing Fields: Explaining Police Violence against Persons of Color.” Journal of Social Issues, vol. 73, no. 4, Dec. 2017, pp. 872–883.https://eds.b.ebscohost.com/eds/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=5&sid=8d538c62-0320-42d3-8064-5bde9e7cdad6%40pdc-v-sessmgr01. Accessed 23 October 2019

Kramer Rory. “Stop, Frisk, and Assault? Racial Disparities in Police Use of Force During Investigatory Stops.” Law & Society Review, v. 52, n. 4, p. 960–993, 2018. <http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx. Accessed 12 Sept. 2019

Lopez, M. V. “When Police Officers Exceed Their Authority: The Applicability of Domestic Terrorism to Police Officers.” University of La Verne Law Review.v. 40, n. 1, p. 64–86,2018.<http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,shib&db=lgs&AN=138164208&site=eds-live&scope=site> Accessed 12 Sept. 2019