Police Brutality Research Paper

Police brutality against African Americans then and now

Above is a photo of the officers who beat Rodney King with nightsticks after a high speed chase in 1991. The officers were responding as backup for California highway patrol. A highway patrol officer attempted to arrest Rodney with his weapon aimed at him telling him to get on the ground. At this point the sergeant of LAPD Stacey Koon ordered the highway patrolmen to put their weapon away because LAPD was taking control. The officers swarmed Rodney, and after he resisted arrest they tased him twice. Rodney tried to run and this is when the officers began to beat him with the nightsticks. He tried to get up and Sergeant Koon ordered the officers to beat him with “power strokes”, aimed at his joints. Rodney was treated

for several gruesome injuries including permanent brain damage, skull fractures, and broken bones. The officers were acquitted originally but after Federal investigation two of the four were charged and imprisoned. How does this compare with police brutality against blacks in earlier years?

Let’s take a look at Chicago; in December of 1969 police raided a home of two Black Panther members. During the raid there was a supposed extreme firefight between members of the Panthers and raiding police evidence however, shows that the Black Panthers only fired one shot in comparison to the hundred shots fired by police officers that killed two leaders of the Panthers and injured four. The officers told investigators that the panthers had shot several times through the door of the apartment, later it would be discovered that they had punched holes in the door with a hammer, to cover up what had really happened. Even given the obvious attempt to cover this up, no officer was charged. This kind of facade was not uncommon, in Chicago several other members were imprisoned, with no real evidence against them. In 1980, a New Orleans a white police officer was shot and killed by a black male. The response of the New Orleans police force was to start doing what they called booking, and bagging, this is where they would beat arrested black men with phonebooks and put plastic bags over their heads so they could not breathe. A story much closer to

the modern times, comes shortly after Hurricane Katrina. A man name Henry Glover was shot and killed by a NOPD officer on September 5, 2005. After being shot Glover’s neighbor William Tanner drove Glover and his brother to a nearby refuge at an elementary school. The elementary school was occupied by local SWAT members, who chased Glover’s neighbor after he began to flee from a police vehicle. Right beside the school the group was pulled over, the neighbor and brother were taken from the car handcuffed and beaten. The officers claimed that Henry Glover was already dead, yet they set the car on fire, in an attempt to hide what had happened. As if that wasn’t sickening enough four days later an officer from another state recorded the burned car and Glover’s remains and then sold copies of the tape. So looking at a few cases then, and now what has changed about police brutality towards African Americans? If you ask me not much these attacks seem just as, if not more brutal than those of the past. The responsibility for these kinds of vicious assaults does not lie solely with white police officers. We live in a culture, wherein we are taught, though not directly, that we should be afraid of the African American who is impoverished. We are taught that these are the people who commit violent, or drug related crimes. This kind of thinking needs to end, we are one and the same human kind needs to stand together to face challenges in the upcoming years. The African, Asian, Hispanic, Indian, White of the U.S. are not different we are brothers and sisters; this country was built on the hard efforts of a myriad of different cultures, and peoples. Without all of these different people America as we know it would not exist.