What Can Be Done to Stop Police Brutality?

Victoria Cian

English Composition

Professor Bell

9 December 2016

What can be done to stop police brutality?  

“Racism is an ideology, or belief system, designed to justify and rationalize racial and ethnic inequality” (Marger; p. 25) and “discrimination, most basically, is behavior aimed at denying members of particular ethnic groups’ equal access to societal rewards” (p. 57). Be careful! Police brutality is a huge issue because police are getting away with hurting or killing people. Among the 6,613 police officers involved in misconduct 1,575 were involved in excessive force and police brutality; it should be talked about in a more serious way (statistics). The general public may agree or disagree with these claims based on their ethnicity, status, gender, etc. Police officers and normal citizens can both be in the wrong at some point. Sometimes law enforcement officers are put into situations where excessive force is necessary; sometimes the police officers use it to their advantage and that is an issue. Police Brutality should be looked into on both sides of the spectrum, while trying to prevent police brutality as a whole (Gane).

How dangerous is police work? And is misconduct on police still bad?

Although Police Brutality can take place anywhere, police brutality is said to take place more often in fourteen of America’s largest cities. These cities are Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Detroit, Atlanta, Indianapolis, Boston, New Orleans, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Portland, Providence, Washington D.C., and San Francisco. There have been trainings and protests designed to stop brutality in these cities, which have unfortunately failed.

Police work can be dangerous in all aspects. It is a proven fact that the death rate for police is at an all time high. Officer Bartlett, part of the Bradford City Police Department, stated that police brutality is huge, but the deaths of the law enforcement is also a huge issue (Charles). Officer Bartlett had grown up where there was a lot of drugs and alcohol, but he knew how to turn his life around. By looking at both sides of this issue, they are both huge and important. For an example, a Kansas police officer was shot and killed while responding to a shooting. In this incident, the police officer was shot and later was pronounced dead in the Kansas Hospital. In the year 2013, fifty thousand police officers were assaulted; there were fifteen thousand with injuries and thirty-five without injuries (fox news). Police work can be dangerous for all law enforcement officers along with the high rate of police brutality. In conclusion, there should be equal investigation on police brutality, with the fact of police being injured and the citizens being injured or killed (Judis).

In another aspect, does the general public despise law enforcement because of police brutality or because they are in the wrong some way? There is still the debate about if people hate the police because they have done something against the law in the past and that is why they hate them. When people use slurs against police officers just because they are in the wrong is not right. When an individual goes to a restaurant and does not enjoy it, does not mean that they categorize every restaurant as bad. Instead of downgrading every police officer, we should try and start a movement for the decent police officers that risk their lives everyday to protect the citizens (Lawson). There needs to be people with a higher say standing up for victims of police brutality. If there are commercials about animals that get abused, can there not be commercials for the victims of police brutality? Also, if there were more famous people standing up for this cause, it could help for a solution to end police brutality.  

In the book Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson there was a part where a man was arrested for a crime that he did not commit. He had an alibi and was obviously innocent, but the police officer in the car made it clear that no matter what he said, he was going away forever. He spent thirty years in prison until Bryan Stevenson came to his help and defended him. He finally was free from death row. This is a form of police brutality or discrimination because they said he was going to jail for it, just because he was black. They also said that they did not care if he was guilty or not, he was going to be convicted. The man that was on death row said, "The only time that I did not see racism was while on death row because everyone is going to the same place there". He also talked about how he thinks that police brutality is 100% worse in today's world. A lot of people would agree with his opinion on that. Having an actual person to hear their story is life changing on the world of police brutality.