Police brutality is the use of excessive force on a civilian by an officer of the law, such as hitting a civilian when that level of force is not needed (the law dictionary). Police brutality has been happening since the beginning of the police force, police misconduct has become normal due to the development of an organizational culture created within the police organization that passively permits wrong doing by police(Rushin). Due to this oolice brutality has many …show more content…
Studies that have been done show that there may be many different psychological reasons to why these acts occur. Sleep deprivation caused when officers don’t get enough sleep often happens in the line of law enforcement due to the long hours that officers work, this is believed to play a key role in why officers may act out. In 2013, an article was published in the Journal of Basic and Applied Psychology that showed that undergraduates and police recruits who didn’t have enough sleep, even by as little as an hour, had less cognitive control than someone who had gotten the correct amount of sleep (Nuwer). When people have less cognitive control it affects how they process information and tells them how they should react to a situation (Nuwer). A study done by Correll found that between 19 and 41 percent of police officers tested showed signs of sleep deprivation …show more content…
Psychologists believe that these implicit biases can also cause people to see things differently than they actually are. Statistics show that African American citizens get the worst of unjustified police violence (Nuwer). In the United States statistics show that black citizens are 3 times as likely to be killed by a police officer than whites are (Nuwer). Psychologists say that whether a person is black or white thinking about black people causes people to think about weapons and when they think about weapons they associate them with black people (Nuwer). In the United States statistics show that black citizen are 3 times as likely to be killed by a police officer than whites are