The Argument Against Police Brutality

Police brutality is the use of any force exceeding that reasonably necessary to accomplish a lawful police purpose. Although no reliable measure of its incidence exists—let alone one charting change chronologically—its history is undeniably long. The shifting nature and definition of police brutality, however, reflect larger political, demographic, and economic changes. Since the 1970s, Hispanics have come forward in greater numbers and have documented abuses by police, abuses that include unreasonable seizures, physical brutality, and incarceration without cause. Ammunition against police abuse is growing, but the fight on this issue is destined to be a long one. An area of grave concern at the turn of the twenty-first century was the practice of

racial profiling among police. That is, of all the people who were stopped by police, a disproportionately high number were African American or Hispanic.
Police brutality is a fact of American life.

In major cities across the country, officers are abusing their authority in the most flagrant ways. Human Rights Watch makes the following sensible recommendations Progressive era reform efforts to professionalize crime control paradoxically distanced local police from the communities they served, thus eroding important social checks on abuse. Local officers, for example, beat hundreds at a 1930 labor rally in New York City, while Chicago police killed ten strikers in the Republic Steel Memorial Day Massacre of 1937. Less dramatic, but equally revealing, Dallas police formally charged less than five percent of the 8,526 people they arrested "on suspicion" in 1930.
The waves of labor migration after 1917—most prominently, African Americans moving from the rural South to the urban North—racialized police brutality, leading to three major eras of riots stemming from conflict between police and minority groups: 1917–1919, 1943, and 1964–1968. Both the civil rights movement and subsequent urban unrest laid bare the flaws in a model of police professionalism that focused narrowly on fighting crime while ignoring the needs of the communities, especially poor communities, being

policed.
Some observers, relying on findings that an officer's race is unrelated to the propensity to use force, assert racial animosity alone cannot account for brutal actions by the police. Such scholarship holds that brutality under the guise of "quality-of-life" policing serves economic elites by paving the way for urban gentrification. The accelerating reorganization of post-industrial urban economies
around financial, cultural, and high-tech activities has not only decimated employment prospects for low skilled (and often minority) workers, but also required their displacement as a new knowledge-professional class seeks fresh neighborhoods in which to play and live.
Despite early enthusiasm, civilian review boards—able neither to investigate nor control departmental policies—have often proved disappointing, leaving critics to view legislation as the last best hope Not all, not most, police officers are brutal. And many cities, from Boston to San Diego, have reduced crime by taking an enlightened approach, one that stresses community policing and good relations with the citizenry. They have had as much success reducing crime as New York City has, without trampling on civil liberties. Departments around the country should be looking to this civilized approach--and discard the N.Y.P.D. and L.A.P.D. models.
Police cannot become a law unto themselves. Those who act illegally must be forced, through criminal prosecution, to pay for their crimes. And we must hold the officials in charge accountable: the police chief, the mayor, the district attorney.
We deserve to be treated as citizens, not as subjects--or suspects.