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Excessive Use Of Police Force Essay

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In the modern day media, the debate of police abusing their power comes up quite often. A recent example of that would be the shooting of Michael Brown which occurred in Ferguson, Missouri just 2 months ago. This was an example of a police officer using excessive force. Throughout time the idea of Police using excessive force has been recognized more and more. A pretty interesting statistic I found was from More (1972), which basically says since the early 1970s, police murdered a person a day since the statistics were conducted. According to Hickman and Piquero(2009), the question of trusting police to cooperate with citizens has been recognized since the 1960s when America was split because of race. Of course many of you know the 1960s were a time where blacks were beaten because of the Civil Rights Act. Because of incidents and statistics like these, excessive use of police force should be limited more than it currently is.
Excessive of use of police force a lot of times can cause many outrages throughout a society. Things like rallies as well as riots can occur. Take for example the Rodney King case. The whole entire city of Los Angeles literally went into chaos because of the verdict on the trial. …show more content…
As many people know, some of the time minorities live in poor, less stable neighborhoods. According to Reiss(1970), trying to stop African Americans when they are running away and trying to break up gatherings is a pretty common practice in low income areas. This can also lead into the topic of racial profiling. Many minorities throughout time have felt like they have been racially profiled by police officers. According to Tyler and Wakslak (2004), a study was conducted with the final result being that if people have the feeling that they are being treated equally, they would not be so quick to come to the conclusion that the police are

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