The Importance Of Policing

Policing has faced immense scrutiny in recent years due in part to the highly publicized deadly force incidents caught on video. Since the rise in social media, many of these videos have gone viral, which have led to unprecedented levels of public discontent with the police. In a majority of the videos, the officers were White and the identified suspects were Black. As a result, many debates on the use of deadly force have brought light to law enforcement’s explicitly biased attitudes towards minorities. According to Michael Smith and Geoffrey Alpert (2007), police offers are trained to be suspicious, however, after repeated deviant altercations and the media’s connection between race and crime, they are conditioned to view minorities with added suspicion. Additionally, William Cox (2014) emphasizes that when simulating responses to a call with armed criminals, police officers were faster in shooting armed Black suspects when they were displayed as a picture, but slower to shoot them when they were displayed in a video. These …show more content…
Although the movement has received harsh backlash, it has continued in its efforts “rooted in the experiences of Black people in this country who actively resist our dehumanization. #BlackLivesMatter is a call to action and a response to the virulent anti-Black racism that permeates our society. Black Lives Matter is a unique contribution that goes beyond extrajudicial killings of Black people by police and vigilantes” . In addition to its ability to mobilize Black people and allies, the movement has called for all levels of government to make changes. The movement’s efforts have been mainly adopted at the local level. In Ferguson the movement was met with positive efforts from other activists and groups as they rallied and protested for over 100 days following Brown’s