...communities’ response to police brutality particularly in the black communities and also their encounters with police officers. Police brutality is physical violence and great cruelty demonstrated by a police officer. Police brutality and misconduct have existed for many decades and it even has been broadcasted in news stories over America, but nothing has changed. It has happened predominantly to African Americans in lower-income states. Police officers are given slaps on the wrist for taking a life or injuring an innocent person. This will show how police brutality has affected black communities and how African American communities’ have responded to it with movements and protest, and how they try to overcome...
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...Police brutality has been around for hundreds of years, back when racism was a huge problem. Blacks and whites were not considered equal in the eyes of the government and law. White policeman would beat black men, women and children for no reasons at all many of times. Police brutality is the excessive use of force beyond what is necessary to handle a situation. Many people might say Police brutality is not just a racism, which could possibly be true but you see mainly white policeman killing African American men on the news everyday. You cannot just throw out racism as if it does not exist anymore. In the article Excessive or reasonable force by police, the writers John Wihbey and Leighton Walter Kile talks about excessive of the U.S. police...
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...Across the nation, African American parents were fighting for the sons and their sons too. Police brutality became another bondage towards African Americans. Policemen were allowed administrative leave, meaning that cop is getting a slap on the wrist for killing an innocent son and getting paid for it. Afterwhile Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, and Michael Brown passed away, the list continued to get longer. Eventually, young African American ladies Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Tanisha Anderson, and Sandra Bland were added to the 100 list of unarmed blacks killed by police...
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...Police brutality remains a deeply serious social issue, with it impacting communities around the world. Police brutality is “the use of excessive physical force, including beating citizens with hands or batons, or using stun guns (such as Tasers), teargas, and even lethal weapons.” Police brutality has been around for a long time, mainly because of racism. People of color, specifically black people, often experience police brutality. The Fourth Amendment is “the US Constitution that protects individuals from unreasonable searches and seizures which is often not mentioned when in cases of police brutality and these officers are violating their constitutional rights.” Many articles and websites have shown different ways that police officers have...
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...370 December 4th, 2014 Sociology of Race Relations With Police Officers The United States prides itself on life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. As a country, all men are created equal and have the same opportunities. However, to this day, that is not the case. For decades and arguably centuries, African Americans and other minorities have continued to fight this ongoing battle against racism and prejudice. This struggle is also very prevalent in police and judicial affairs. With the recent racial tension going on in the United States, it is important to understand why African Americans are still feeling this way in order to find ways in which to eliminate police brutality. Using Weber’s theory of authority, one can apply his ideology to the recent events in race relations and police officers in order to understand the ongoing tension and divulging into the reasoning behind people’s reactions to these events, emphasizing the issue is centralized around power and authority. There are everyday events that occur that highlight the ongoing racial tension between African Americans and police officers, showing that discrimination and racism is not dead here in the United States. For example, take the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson, Missouri. There is major controversy in the telling of the Michael Brown shooting. Michael Brown was shot and killed on August 9th by Officer Darren Wilson (Clarke). Brown was unarmed when the incident happened and the witnesses’...
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...In light of recent events, tensions amongst American citizens and police officers have risen due to the alleged use of excessive force and the unjust shootings of African Americans. In the aftermath of such incidents, the integrity of police officers has been called into question, raising the issue of whether or not police should wear body cameras. With increasingly widespread reports of such incidents, it is clear that body cameras do need to be implemented into police forces in order to restore public confidence in police officers. On the 17th of July 2014, Eric Garner was approached by NYPD police officers, on the suspicion of selling cigarettes without tax stamps. Garner responded by saying that he would not be harassed and that he...
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...As we all know; we have had a lot of tragic incidents happening between the police and citizens. The huge number of incidents over the years have caused the world quite a significant amount of pain and suffering. It seems like the police have forgotten their moral values as being someone who is to stop crime and ensure safety in our neighborhoods, towns and cities; not become those who create crime and break the law knowing the only thing that is saving them from being incarcerated is their badge. It should be a heavy requirement for police officers to wear cameras on their person because without them; it’s our word against theirs and if someone is wrongfully pulled over, beaten or killed; there will be solid proof of what really happened at the time of any incident whether if it’s wrong or right. Police officers have always abused their authority for many years. We have a few officers out there that know how to handle their authority and actually go by the guidelines of what their job description states. Then we have those officers who just don’t know to act when it comes to their job and the amount of authority that they have. With that being said; those are also the kind of officers who make it their business to harass certain people; talk to them any kind of way, write out bogus tickets and let’s not forget the “American all time”: racial profiling. Most of the stories out here today and from years ago are resulting in racial profiling towards African Americans. ...
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...has rebelled against their government or religion. An individual is justified to rebel against his government when there's an excess of police brutality, that individual can be living in a nation where the government is not an ideal government, or unjust treatment of an ethnicity. There are many ways to rebel against ones government and/or religious institution, in the past rebelling has varied from protesting to a world wide revolution. Revolutionary leaders such as Che Guevara and Martin Luther King Jr. both lead groups which allowed people who rebelled against their government to obtain justice. Two philosophers who spoke on rebelling against their government or religion were Friedrich Nietzsche in “Morality as Anti-Nature” and Henry Thoreau in “Civil Disobedience.” A situation that occurred to justify an individuals rebellion against their government is the act of excess police brutality. A perfect example of excessive police brutality is the Eric Garner case. In this case Eric Garner was put in a choke hold by a New York City Police Department officer named Daniel Pantaleo, he ended up killing him and did not get indicted. This decision came nearly a week after a cop killed an unarmed African American, Michael Brown. This caused many people to walk and protest in Time Square chanting “This Stops Today” and “I Can't Breathe,” which were Eric Garner’s last words (NY Times). A more popular case that’s historical in American history is the Rodney King case. Rodney King was initially...
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...of African-American civil rights movements have been the post-Civil War constitutional amendments that abolished slavery and established the citizenship status of blacks, and the judicial decisions and legislation based on these amendments, notably the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision of 1954, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. These legal changes greatly affected the opportunities available to women, nonblack minorities, disabled individuals, and other victims of discrimination. The Brown decision demonstrated that the litigation strategy of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) could undermine the legal foundations of southern segregationist practices, but the strategy worked only when blacks, acting individually or in small groups, assumed the risks associated with crossing racial barriers. Thus, even after the Supreme Court declared that public school segregation was unconstitutional, black activism was necessary to compel the federal government to implement the decision and extend its principles to all areas of public life rather than simply in schools. The initial phase of the black protest activity in the post-Brown period began on December 1, 1955. Rosa Parks of Montgomery, Alabama, refused to give up her seat to a white bus rider, thereby defying a southern custom that required blacks to give seats toward the front of buses to whites. When she was jailed, a black community boycott...
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...Michael Scheldrup Wesbrook Advanced English III March 12, 2015 It’s Time for a Change Social issues have lingered in the shadows of American history since the day that our independence was signed in 1776, a mere two hundred and thirtynine years ago. At that time, social issues consisted of our founding father’s debate over which men were to be considered equal, and the social issue of slavery as a whole became prominent to our young nation. From slavery to suffrage, the United States is no stranger to defining these particular social wrongs, and striving to make them right. As time has developed, the issues of old have passed, but now, new ones have arose. Currently, sitting in 2015, the United States is again being subjected to another social issue; that is police brutality and the use of body cameras as a means of holding all parties involved accountable for their actions. It is simply irresponsible not to implement this new means of technology and I believe that it’s use is a key factor in solving the social issue of police brutality, and the untrust and stigmas that stem from this abuse of power. Names like Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Eric Garner have dominated headlines of many major news outlets for the past two years. The common factor between the three being the excessive use of force upon unarmed civilians. In the cases of Martin and Brown, both men were fatally shot, both were unarmed, and both had two conflicting sides of the story detailing ...
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...In the coverage of citizens’ responses to death in relation to police brutality, they focus on male deaths, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin and Eric Garner, and omit the female victims. Men shouldn’t be the only names that are remembered in the fight against police brutality, Aiyana Jones, Yvette Smith, Natasha McKenna and Tanisha Anderson are just as important and vibrant examples of how detrimental police brutality can be. Additionally, countless trans* men and women and teens die with minimal detail, from police brutality, Nizah Morris, to suicide, Blake Brockington, Ash Haffner and Leela Alcorn, their lives are in danger and they’re still being continuously...
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...Rodney King, Eric Garner, Renisha McBride, John Crawford, Tamir Rice, Marlene Pinnock, Dontre Hamilton, Ezell Ford, Tanisha Anderson, Akai Gurley, Freddie Gray, and Tony Robinson are just some of the many unarmed African Americans killed by the police within recent years. Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book, Between the World and Me, discusses these injustices. He addresses these topics to his son, Samori. He also discourses his memoir towards white Americans so he can bequeath awareness about what it is like to grow up African American. Coates discussed growing up as an African American in the Baltimore projects. He argues about the inequalities of the public-school system and about white Americans stuck in “the Dream” (Coates 11). “The Dream” is the ingroup favoritism of white...
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...Perpetrators of these violations are often those charged with protection: the police. A report by Amnesty International in the same year detailed police using lethal and unnecessary force towards predominately black and Hispanic people (Terence Fitzgerald). Sixteen years later, the death of a black teenager, Michael Brown, at the hands of a policeman, sparked national outrage. The phrase coined, “Hands up, don’t shoot,” addressed the presumption of guilt that exists towards people...
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...downfall There were countless moments where 2014 was an unforgettable year for good things, but the good outweighed by the bad every single time. August 9, 2014 18 year old Michael Brown was shot and killed by St.Louis county police officer Darren Wilson. Brown was in a convenience store and decided to steal 48 dollars worth of cigars and while in the process of doing that he physically assaulted the store clerk....
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...There have been many instances of police brutality against African Americans in the last few years. For example; the shooting of Trayvon Martin in 2012, the death of Eric Garner in 2014, Sandra Bland in 2015 and the fatal murder of Michael Brown in 2014, which sparked the birth of liberation movements in the United States (Sanburn). In light of such hostility, African American writers such as James Baldwin have been selected by liberation movements to express the black struggle and the need for love and unity. Baldwin’s work has generated documentaries such as ‘I Am...
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