'Black Cities: Evaluating The Police'

The conversation about race and the discrimination surrounding it has been around for centuries in the United States. Many citizens today however seem to think racial prejudices are a thing of the past and not significant enough for legitimate discussion. This thought can be countered by watching the news for five minutes a day – race dominates the US’s media stream, especially after tragedies such as the deaths of Michael Brown, Trayvon Brown, and Eric Garner. The death of Michael Brown, specifically, caused tremendous upheaval not only on the television screen, but also in the streets. Brown was fatally shot by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri after stealing a pack of cigars from a local convenient store. The facts of the altercation …show more content…
In areas where there isn’t enough police presence, crime is rampant and the residents often live in fear and feel as if they are unprotected. The opposite is true for those who live in areas of extremely high police activity – they feel as if they are living in a community where no matter what they do they will wind up getting in trouble with the law. Due to the imbalance of police activity on either end of the spectrum, these communities develop a deep-rooted distrust towards law enforcement, which often leads to a sense of animosity. This idea further develops Riedel’s picture as well as Howell’s idea about the factors that affect police perception in a new and insightful way. The unequal balance of law enforcement between whites and blacks, a form of discrimination in itself, is given context through Weitzer’s ideas and is shown to be true in Riedel’s picture of …show more content…
He uses data from police shootings that lead to fatalities. Jacobs found that law enforcement is most likely to use deadly force in areas of large income disparities, spikes of crime, and where populations are rapidly growing, such as inner cities (410). All of these characteristics lend themselves towards African American communities. These statistics show clear discrimination and prejudice by the police officers when compared to white communities – the rate of police shootings, let alone police killings, is not even close to the rate in black communities. Riedel’s picture shows this injustice playing out and how the victims of the discrimination are reacting to it. The concepts of Weitzer and Howell are represented and explained through the data and analysis of Jacobs. All of the protestors in the photo had seen the unequal risk of being killed by the police by the media coverage of Michael Brown, and also sense the imbalance of police presence in the