Police Brutality In America Essay

Words: 1761
Pages: 8

Police abuse remains as one of the most serious human rights violations in the United States. Over the past decade, police have acted out in ways that have made people wonder “does society get the police service it deserves” and “does police brutality reflect a brutal society?” Unjustified shootings, severe beatings, fatal choking’s, and rough treatment have all contributed to the ever-present problem of police brutality in America. The fact of the matter is that most of these incidents go un-reported or un-noticed. Through research, we seek to identify the causes of police brutality.
Police brutality has always been a major issue in the U.S. In the early days of policing, acts of mass brutality were usually attributed to the poor labor workers. From the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, to the Pullman Strike of 1894, the Lawrence textile strike of 1912, the Ludlow massacre of 1914, the Steel strike of 1919, and the Hanapepe massacre of 1924, the police would brutally beat striking laborers. Next came Prohibition, The Civil Rights Movement, The Vietnam War and the Nixon administration which all had large scale acts of police brutality
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The main cause of police brutality is racial profiling. Blacks are more than twice likely to be unarmed when killed by police encounters than whites. Native Americans are just as likely to get killed as blacks. “In any case, the numbers are misleading. ‘Based on that data Mr. Moskos reported that roughly 49 percent of those killed by officers from May 2013 to April 2015 were white, while 30 percent were black,’ the Washington Times article said. ‘He also found that 19 percent were Hispanic.’ That may be true, but whites make up 63 percent of the population of this country. Blacks are just 12 percent. When Mr. Moskos adjusted his data to account for that, he found that black men were 3.5 times more likely to be killed by cops than white men. That’s inconvenient.”