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Police brutality is big example of an injustice that has been going on for the longest time. In the U.S. police brutality has been going on forever, lots of people have died because of police forces throughout the country. There are more than one reason for this injustice. Race, Age, Religion, and sex are main parts of why this happens, not in other places in the world but in the U.S. 776 people were killed by police so far in 2015, 161 of them were unarmed. Police brutality is an example of injustice for young citizens of the United States because they’re being targeted because of their age and race, police abuse their power over the youth, and the police don’t get in trouble for their actions.
Police Brutality is an example of injustice
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for young citizens of the United States because they’re being targeted because of their age. In an article by Meghan Keneally it states that a boy was “fatally shot by a Cleveland police officer over a toy gun ” This quotation shows this boy was shot because he was playing with a toy gun and someone happened to call the police and 2 seconds after arriving the 12 year old boy was taken as a threat and was shot to death by the cops. This is an injustice because cops should approach the scene knowing it’s a minor trying to handle the situation in a calm way, not shooting an innocent child without knowing what’s going on, they targeted this kid since he was younger. This connects to the story of the students that was violently removed from her in South Carolina. In the article it states “ A student slammed to the ground by a South Carolina school resource officer” This quote shows an unnecessary way to get a student out of class. There was no need for the officer to throw her around because of a minor situation which in this case was that the girl was asked to put away her phone but she did not listen. The school officer was called in and he violently escorted the student out of the class. This represents an injustice because this girl was mistreated and taken advantage of because she was a minor. Police brutality is an injustice because a certain kind of people are being treated differently because of their age. In this example the police abuse their power over the youth. In the article used as a source it states “A black 14-year-old Round Rock High School student was grabbed by the throat and dragged to the ground by a police officer in the school.” A student is grabbed by his throat after getting into an shoving argument with another the student. When talking to the 14 year old boy the boy says to leave him alone and he is grabbed by his throat and tackled to the ground. This is very shocking and unnecessary to treat an underaged student just because over some minor fight in school, he proposed no threat to the officers when talking to them. These school police officers abused their power over this boy, the situation was minor and this 14 year old boy suffered from injustice. This situation connects to an incident in Washington where another student this time in college is mistreated because of their age and race. Another example of abuse of power is a freshman student in a college in Washington. In the article it says “Jason Goolsby, an 18-year-old freshman at the University of the District of Columbia, being brutally taken down by police officers Monday night. D.C. police claimed the incident was in response to reports of a robbery, but later said Goolsby had not committed a crime.” An 18 year old black college student is accused of robbery when at the bank with a friend and is violently tackled to the ground by officers when after all he didn’t commit any crime. Even innocent students aren’t safe. Injustice is presented to this students because of his race and age they saw him as an easy target and abused their power. This connects to a story to when my 15 year-old friend went to go get something from his mom’s friend car the police officers thought he was stealing from the car and was put on the ground cause he was resisting because he thought hadn’t done anything wrong. Another reason police brutality is an injustice is because police don’t get in trouble for their actions.
In the article about a skateboarder in NY it says "Over abuse of power as always!" Mu wrote on his Facebook page. "I'm so over the injustices so many people face in this country. Social, economic, race, class, everything!" It’s shown that a skateboarder is mistreated because he didn’t know the rules of the park, then refuses to give officer his board. The NYPD officer pulls his head back by his hair before putting him in a headlock. After tackling Mu, the officer pulls out his pepper spray and shoots it in the skateboarder's face. The officer did not face any consequences after this incident. This example shows that police officers do not get punished for their actions. This connects to the man that was shot with his hands up in the in sign of surrendering. The power of officers were abused because there wasn’t any need be any violent when no threat is being presented. Another example is a man is texas who suffered from injustice when he was shot with his hands in the air. In the articles it states “A second video has emerged showing two Texas police officers shoot and kill a man who appears to have had his hands up.” This quotation shows that a man commits a crime, is caught and then surrenders to the police with his hands up in the air. The texas police officers shot the man which clearly wasn’t a threat considering he was giving up with his hands in the air. The texas officers show injustice because they abused their power when taking unspeakable actions to kill this
man. Throughout the years police brutality in the U.S. has shown lots and lots of examples of injustice in many ways. People are being targeted because of their age, police abuse their power, and they don’t get in trouble for those actions. All of these articles have shown that this injustice is still around and very big to this day. This people are taken advantage of because they are vulnerable to police since they don’t have power. Young citizens are being killed because the people are not doing their job right. Injustice in any shape or form is never alright, people don’t realize how bad things really are or how bad they can get. Learning about police brutality opens your eyes to a whole new understanding of injustice in the world we live in.
In today’s society, police officers are very cautious on how much force they can use on a suspect due to the police brutality going on right now. Police brutality is defined as the use of force exceeding what is necessary, many people argue that there should be new policies to determine how much force a police officer can use and also have laws that will convict officers who have killed people by using too much force, so that there is less incidents in the future.
America as a people gloat when it comes to our freedoms we think we have it better than every other country out there but the protectors of our freedom are becoming fear and hated because of the injustices committed by certain officers. Some say life of an officer is hard because they do not know if they will ever see their family again after they drive out of their house in the morning, others might say every officer knows what they were signing up for so they should not be pitied. Police officers face dangers everyday but profiling and racially motivated brutality is not justifiable and officers should be severely punished for committing these crimes.
Police brutality has been a significant issue for many years.. The people affected by this most of all, are people of color. They are subject to racial inequality by the police and the justice system every day. They are being killed everyday simply for existing. The excessive force used by the police specifically towards African Americans is continuous; with the justice system doing close to nothing to change that. This is one of the reasons they continue to kill and harass African Americans. According to Propublica, young black males are about twenty times more likely to be shot and killed by the police than their white peers are. Murderers are walking free, and innocent lives are being taken. Over the past couple of years, thousands of people have been killed on the hands of the police, both black and white.
Over the years, this country has witnessed many cases of police brutality. It has become a controversial topic among communities that have seen police brutality take place in front of their homes. Officers are faced with many threatening situations everyday forcing them to make split second decisions and to expect the worst and hope for the best. Police officers are given the power to take any citizens rights away and even their lives. With that kind of power comes responsibility, that’s one major concern with the amount of discretion officers have is when to use force or when to use lethal force. The use of excessive force may or not be a large predicament but should be viewed by both the police and the community.
The New York Police Department has a mission to "preserve peace, reduce fear, maintain order," and protect its civilians in their communities (NYPD, 2016). On the contrary, civilians do not see the police officers as individuals who are there to protect them because they do not trust the police officers or the justice system. In the past few decades, police officers have not been held accountable for their actions in a few incidents where a few unarmed young black males were killed by the police. Communities responded to this issue with the Black Lives Matter movement with protests nationwide to show support for the unarmed young black men who were killed by police. In response to the aggressive policing, methods of using body cameras and detailed incident reporting ...
For many years in the past, police action particularly police abuse, has come to be unclear. Citizens are worried about protecting them from criminals. In fact they need to me aware of the corrupt police officers that are in the streets today as well as the criminals. There are many examples that make police brutality the worst as it is today. This one is one of them. Police Officer Daniel is in the choke hold death of Eric Garner, come in the wake if November 15th by the channel 24 news in Ferguson Missouri, police officer would walk free after killing 10 year old Michael Brown. (www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-32740523) In the present police brutality does exist in the mist of us in the time and age we live in everyday. We just haven’t seen it yet. There are people that think if a police
In the Ferguson article (2015), there was an example given about an African American man claimed that he was standing outside of of Wal-Mart, an officer called him a “stupid motherf****r” and a “bastard.” According to the man, a lieutenant was on the scene and did nothing to reproach the officer, instead threatening to arrest the man (p. 80). This demonstrates that the police in Ferguson had no respect for the civilian and even though the lieutenant was present, they did nothing. The officer was not suspended nor held responsible for this incident. By failing to hold officers accountable, it sends a message that officers can behave as they like, “regardless of law or policy, and even if caught, that punishment will be light.” (Ferguson, 86). This message serves to excuse officer wrongdoing and heighten community distrust. This is also to say that police can possibly get away with murder because they are higher officials and work for the
When hearing the phrase “police brutality,” many people imagine batons cracking skulls, tasers electrocuting bodies and bullets penetrating innocent teens. While police officers have been known to use violence, police brutality does not occur as often as many believe. In many situations, officers have to act on impulse and curiosity, despite the backlash the media may create.
Police brutality is rising heavily in the United States. Many cases of police brutality are being reported regularly by the media. There have been victims either physically injured, molested, permanently disabled, killed in the process or even die in the care of officers. Ethnic minority groups are major victims of most cases of reported police brutalities in America. There have been more injustice than justice in these cases and if there’s no serious legal consequences against police’s that engage in racial profiling and brutalities against their victims then it may continue to and eventually they will lose the public’s trust and respect for our officers. And in worst cases may lead to the breakdown of law and order as well as the destruction of lives, properties and communities.
Chaney and Robertson, (2013) stated that “The Department of Justice office of Civil Rights has investigated more than a dozen police departments in major cities across the country on allegations of racial discrimination or police brutality”. Police brutality is defined as the use of excessive physical force or verbal assault and psychological intimidation. White police officers who grew up in the south and were raised to see African Americans in a negative way have a lower opinion of them. However, not all white police officers are from the south, some say that police officers are just abusing their power. When we look at what is going on around the country, it appears racism plays a part in police brutality. Even during this new digital age, there are video cameras in police cars facing the front of the vehicle, but that still does not hinder police using excessive
Police brutality is one of the most serious human rights violations in the United States and it occurs everywhere. The reason why I chose this topic is because police brutality happens all the time in the United States and still remains unrecognized by many. Additionally, the public should be knowledgeable about this topic because of how serious this crime can be and the serious outcomes that police brutality can have on other police officers and the public. The job of police officers is to maintain public order, prevent, and detect crimes. They are involved in very dangerous and stressful occupations that can involve violent situations that must be stopped and controlled by any means. In many confrontations with people, police may find it necessary to use excessive force to take control of a certain situation. Sometimes this makes an officer fight with a suspect who resists being arrested. Not all cops in communities are great cops. At least once a year, the news covers a story about a person being beat by an officer. The article “Minority Threat and Police Brutality: Determinants of Civil Rights Criminal Complaints in U.S. Municipalities” by Malcolm D. Holmes from the University of Wyoming, uses the conflict theory to explain why officers go after minorities sometimes causing police brutality. It explains the police’s tension with African American and Latino males. Those minorities are the ones that retaliate more against police officers which causes the officer to use violent force to defend themselves.
Walsh & Conway(2011) suggested standards of police should be to implement transparency be responsive and maintain professional, human rights. The black people and lower class people face this violence in form of deadly force and shootings. In the 2011 publication, Gabbidon, Higgins & Potter suggested police to be more corrupt, unfair , harsh and cruel against black people.The police needs to be accountable to its community and department but by doing these kind of acts they are felt to be unsafe in the smaller communities. The brutality lead to push the black people to slavery in many countries by enforcing racial discrimination on them. In the past brutality was done by police in situations of racial discrimination which is still going on at many places to preserve power of upper class white people and for political purposes. This practice of brutality has a strong effect on minority groups like the blacks. If it is observed in a legal context police brutality is an abuse in law enforcement where a police officer has an upper hand because of the uniform they are wearing and the firearms they use which cannot be used by an ordinary individual. Examples of police brutality can be taken from the United States of America where in reality the black people are being discriminated by violating
History has shown that certain racial groups, especially Black and Latino have had a long, and poor relationship with the police largely due to socio-economic and racist discrimination in one way another. Race is a tremendous part when it comes to the fact of police brutality, but you only see something have a tremendous outbreak when it is the white officers assaulting someone of the opposite race. Maybe it isn’t always the race that comes to the problem but the fact that the citizen was doing something wrong. Then just because he or she is of a different race then all fingers are then pointed at the officer who was just trying serving justice. This is saying that it could go both ways, it isn’t always the cops at fault but that is what media has perceived it to be and has but a stereotype toward officers of the law. Maybe it was the civilian that has egged them on or threatened them. They do have a right to protect themselves, and sometimes that is exploited by the media and even the community at
Police officers primary responsibility is to protect and serve citizens and communities, not to abuse the laws by hurting innocent people. In most states Stand-Your-Ground laws allows innocent citizens the right to use deadly force to defend and protect themselves. But what if they were protecting themselves from police brutality. Police brutality has been going on for many years; they can cause riots, injuries, and even mistrust for the police.
Police brutality is an act that often goes unnoticed by the vast majority of white Americans. This is the intentional use of “excessive force by an authority figure, which oftentimes ends with bruises, broken bones, bloodshed, and sometimes even death” (Harmon). While law-abiding citizens worry about protecting themselves from criminals, it has now been revealed that they must also keep an eye on those who are supposed to protect and serve. According to the National Police Academy, in the past year, there have been over 7,000 reports of police misconduct; fatalities have been linked to more than 400 of these cases (Gul). Police brutality is often triggered by disrespect towards the police officer.