Police Violence Police brutality is the use of excessive and/or unnecessary force by police when dealing with civilians. Police violence can happen for a number of reasons, but racial profiling and targeting are major reasons as to why there are such problems. Racial profiling is any use of race, religion, ethnicity, or national origin by law enforcement agents as a means of deciding who should be investigated, except where these characteristics are part of a specific suspect description. As Professor Angela Davis has noted, “The practical effect of this deference [to law enforcement discretion] is the assimilation of police officers’ subjective beliefs, biases, hunches, and prejudices into law” (Fisanick 57). Violence’s continue to happen
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Social scientists with large-scale amounts of research have found that, “Many communities are embedded with a deep sense of mistrust” (“Excessive or Reasonable”). Trust within officers and civilians are very rare because of the extensive amount of police brutality. The confidence in law enforcement is at an all-time low, divisions of minority groups believe that the police are more likely to use an imprudent amount of force on suspects of minority races. Police brutality is happening all the time, “Thus, every act of police brutality and misconduct, every frame-up, every act of illegal surveillance, every justified murder erases an article from the Bill of Rights and takes us another step closer to a police state” (Cha-Jua). The criminal prosecutions for police violence rarely to any occur because many of the state prosecutors are unwillingly able to pursue the abuse charges which then make civilians mistrust the officers because of the lack of a consequence. According to a Pew/USA Today poll “Americans of all races collectively give relatively low marks to police departments around the country for holding officers accountable for misconduct, using the appropriate amount of force, and treating racial and ethnic groups equally” (“Excessive or Reasonable”). There is an absence of trust towards police officers through many
Social scientists with large-scale amounts of research have found that, “Many communities are embedded with a deep sense of mistrust” (“Excessive or Reasonable”). Trust within officers and civilians are very rare because of the extensive amount of police brutality. The confidence in law enforcement is at an all-time low, divisions of minority groups believe that the police are more likely to use an imprudent amount of force on suspects of minority races. Police brutality is happening all the time, “Thus, every act of police brutality and misconduct, every frame-up, every act of illegal surveillance, every justified murder erases an article from the Bill of Rights and takes us another step closer to a police state” (Cha-Jua). The criminal prosecutions for police violence rarely to any occur because many of the state prosecutors are unwillingly able to pursue the abuse charges which then make civilians mistrust the officers because of the lack of a consequence. According to a Pew/USA Today poll “Americans of all races collectively give relatively low marks to police departments around the country for holding officers accountable for misconduct, using the appropriate amount of force, and treating racial and ethnic groups equally” (“Excessive or Reasonable”). There is an absence of trust towards police officers through many