Police Brutality Literature Review

The literature on the topic of police brutality encompasses various areas ranging from police-suspect interactions to the bias attitudes developed by particular communities in response to police brutality. There are four areas of literature to be reviewed pertaining most to my topic. First, the literature proposes how the identities of an individual affect their opinions of law enforcement, which formulates their response to interactions with the police. Next, I will examine literature surrounding social policing ecology or the tendencies of the police. Subsequently, I will explore federal government laws and policies the directly affect law enforcement conduct. Finally, the remaining literature exploration will indicate the pre-existing research …show more content…
Walker (2012) argues that community policing and problem-oriented policing have failed and policy continues to erode. With this in mind, multiple authors believe there is a large need for police policy reform (Braga, 2008; Decker & Rosenfeld, 2004). Since my research is inquiring about the effectiveness of policy, I looked for a current literary reference that is researching a similar topic. Chanin (2014) is researching the efficiency of Section 14141 of the Violent Crime Act of 1994. Chanin (2014) finds that the reform did minimize police brutality while the institutions were under high observation from the Department Of Justice. After, this monitoring dwindled, so did the enforcements and the reforms that accompanied this act. The parameters of this data stretch from 1994 to 2008 based on information sourced in Pittsburgh, Washington D.C., and …show more content…
As my first hypothesis indicates, I think that the amount of police brutality has remained consistent over time, my research will examine the overall effectiveness of policies against police brutality, but on a federal rather than a city level. Since there is a plethora of literature regarding the tendencies of police and consequently, the effects that their tendencies have on individuals, it is crucial to determine the actual effectiveness of police brutality policy. Through exploring the literature revolving around police brutality, I included only topics most central to policy and police behaviors. My extensive research indicates a gap in the overall effectiveness of national police brutality policy, which I intend to exploit through a comparative data analysis of the number of police brutality cases nationwide within the last 20 years. An analysis on the national level will call for more federal attention to the fluctuation of national police brutality as well as a comparative tool that indicates what kinds of policy policies work best and are implemented most