Police Brutality: The Rights Of African Americans

Decent Essays
Police Brutality
Police brutality has been an issue in society for years and remains as a major concern today, especially for people of color. This issue often seems to result in death for many African Americans. In fact, “police killed at least 102 unarmed black people, nearly twice each week… Mapping Police Violence (2014) stated that “Only 10 of the 102 cases in 2015 where an unarmed black person was killed by police resulted in an officer being charged with a crime”. If these are only statistics from the year 2015, one can imagine how drastically the numbers must have increased since then. The issue of police brutality has made a lot of individuals brave enough to assert their opinions about it and work hard to try to cease the issue. A group which formed in the year of 2012, Black Lives Matter, plays a big role in speaking up by protesting not only against police brutality, but also against the overall mistreatment of African Americans.
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The entire problem of police brutality is hypocritical, seeing that police officers are meant to serve to protect communities from harm, not cause the harm. According to Mapping Police Violence (2014) “Unarmed black people were killed at 5x the rate of unarmed whites in 2015”. This is not to say that unarmed blacks are the only individuals who seem to be murdered by police officers, it has happened with other races as well, but not as frequently as with the African American race. Black people have been mistreated for centuries now and it is truly disgraceful. Our ancestors have even had to undergo slavery and beatings, yet today in 2016, black people are still mistreated and barely respected as human

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