Persuasive Speech On Police Shootings

Affirmative “I can’t breathe.” Those were Eric Garner, an unarmed, black father’s last words before being choked to death by officers in the New York police department. “I don’t have a gun, stop shooting.” Those were Michael Brown’s last words, an 18 year old, black high school graduate set to start college in two days. “Mom, I’m going to college.” Those were Amadou Diallo’s last words. He was a 22 year old immigrant from Guinea who had saved up 9,000 dollars to go to college. These sound like short horror stories, things that would happen few and far between, but sadly, that’s not the case at all. The Free Thought Project estimates that one person is killed by the police every eight hours. England and Wales’ police have killed 55 in the

In Denver, police gunned down a 17 year old girl, Jessie Hernandez, riding in a stolen car. In North Carolina, police shot and killed a 77 year old man, Douglas Harris, after his son asked for them to check up on him. What did these two individuals have in common? Two things: they were both shot and killed by the police, and they were both part of a minority group. We’ve all heard of the Planned Parenthood shooter, the Colorado theater shooter, and the Chapel Hill Shooter. These three shooters have two things in common-they were all white and they were all taken alive. We rarely hear of minority mass shooters for a reason-there are less of them. A study by politicalresearch.org proves that 90% of school shootings over the last three decades were comitted by white men. Why is it fair that Jessie Hernandez, who was not innocent but not a mass shooter, was killed but Robert Lewis Dear Jr., who killed a police officer and two civilians, was taken in

Data compiled for the Guardian shows that over 1,000 people were killed by the police this year. To add to the brutality of this, 203, or about 20% of them, were unarmed. Based on the statistics, police killed more white people than ever this year, 532 have been killed so far. This being said, blacks are being killed at a greater rate. Police have killed almost seven per every million black residents of America. That’s five more than whites, who are being killed at a rate of two to a million. Narrowing the statistics even more, 1 out of 4 African Americans killed by the police were unarmed. That’s about 10% more than the rate unarmed, white citizens are being killed at. A popular defense of the police’s recent, brutal actions are that police are also being killed at a rate too great to be justified. The National Law Enforcement Officer’s Memorial Fund reports that 25 officers have been fatally shot in 2015, and two of those officers died due to technilogical malfunctions. Farmers are more likely to be killed on the job than police. In fact, the Beaureu of Labor Statistics released information last year that reveals being a police officer isn’t even among the top ten most dangerous jobs in