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In this article, it talks about police brutality using excessive force towards “people of color, people with mental illness, disabled people, immigrants, homeless people, and members of the LGBTQ community.” weapons such as a baton, taser, or gun are being used. From 2019 there are reports that 1,098 people faced police brutality. 24% of those killings encounter with black people. Having social media we can see evidence of the encounter of police brutality.

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Police brutality refers to the excessive use of force by law enforcement. Officers may use force in certain situations. Deadly force may be justified in self-defense or in the defense of others. However, when the use of force goes beyond what is appropriate for the situation and causes unnecessary pain, safety risks, or death, it may be considered excessive.

Some incidents of police brutality involve the use of a weapon such as a baton, Taser, or gun. The use of tear gas, pepper spray, or rubber bullets to disperse groups of people may also be considered police brutality. Police brutality can involve psychological intimidation, verbal abuse, false arrests, and sexual abuse. Data indicates people in several marginalized groups experience high rates of police brutality. This includes people of color, people with mental illness, disabled people, immigrants, homeless people, and members of the LGBTQ community.

Ending police brutality has long been a focus of civil rights movements in the United States. However, technological advances in the 2010s helped spread awareness about the issue. Though evidence of police brutality has been shared widely on social media, officers often avoid accountability. In 2020 social media users and traditional media outlets shared footage of a white police officer killing George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, by kneeling on his neck. The incident inspired demonstrations locally as well as in cities around the United States and over forty other countries. The protests continued for several weeks, motivating renewed national conversations about systemic racism and police reform.

Fast Facts

The Mapping Police Violence project reports that 1,098 civilians were killed by police in 2019. Black people accounted for 24 percent of those killings despite accounting for just 13 percent of the total population.

A police officer was charged with a crime in just 1 percent of police-involved killings between 2013 and 2019.

Police recruits spend more than seven times as much time on firearms training than learning how to de-escalate volatile situations.

According to a 2019 study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Black men and boys face the highest lifetime risk of being killed by police.

Women's lifetime risk of being killed by police is almost twenty times lower than that of men. Among women, Black and Indigenous women face the highest risk.

According to LAPD data, more than one in three uses of force by a Los Angeles police officer during the third quarter of 2019 involved a person experiencing homelessness.

Between 2004 and 2016, the city of Chicago paid over $662 million in legal fees and damages to victims of police misconduct.

Prevalence of Police Brutality

Efforts to track the use of force by police, including officer-involved deaths, have faced several challenges. Government data has been criticized as incomplete and misleading. Independent research by activists, journalist, and others has revealed significant disparities between official numbers and the actual number of incidents.

Several Black Lives Matter (BLM) activists launched the Mapping Police Violence project in 2015. BLM is a social justice movement that protests systemic racism and police violence. The project tracks police violence and highlights racial disparities in the application of force. The project also analyzes police training. The project's findings have mobilized BLM and other social justice groups to stress the urgency of addressing police brutality.

Members of law enforcement and their supporters have expressed opposition to such activism. They argue that the police should be able to use whatever force they deem necessary. This has led to the creation of counter-movements such as Blue Lives Matter and proposals that violence against law enforcement officers be prosecuted as a hate crime.

In addition to racial and ethnic minorities, other communities face an increased likelihood of encountering police brutality. Transgender people have reported mistreatment from law enforcement, including verbal harassment, physical or sexual assault, and being forced to perform sex acts to avoid arrest. The United Nations has condemned the treatment of homeless people by US police.

Impact of Video Technology and Social Media

The rise of social media and the universal use of mobile phone cameras have enabled evidence of police brutality to be shared with the public, sometimes in real time. Video documentation can be powerful in the court of public opinion. However, many officers have avoided prosecution despite video evidence. Such instances have worsened tensions between communities and local law enforcement. Many have led to protests and, in some cases, riots.

Private video technology emerged as a valuable tool for exposing police brutality in 1991. At that time, a civilian recorded the beating of African American taxi driver Rodney King by Los Angeles police officers. The nine-minute recording sparked a nationwide public outcry. In state court, a predominantly white jury acquitted the officers charged with excessive force. Frustrated by the lack of accountability, members of South Los Angeles's African American community began rioting on April 29, 1992. The riots lasted between five and six days. Many businesses were looted, over sixty people died, and thousands experienced injuries and arrest.

Later cases involving police brutality and video technology have often produced similar results as the King incident. Public outrage is often met with minimal repercussions for the officers involved. In 2016, for example, the livestreaming of Philando Castile's death during a traffic stop in St. Anthony, Minnesota, gained national attention. However, a jury acquitted the officer of all charges in 2017. The verdict inspired residents in the Minneapolis-Saint Paul area to protest.

The video of George Floyd's death on May 25, 2020, resonated with many viewers. The footage showed Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, who is white, kneeling on Floyd's neck while other officers did not intervene to help Floyd as he pleaded for his life. All of the officers lost their jobs. Chauvin faced murder charges related to the death, and his fellow officers received lighter charges. Many politicians, celebrities, and others expressed their support for the protests that followed Floyd's death. Further, the protests appeared to be effective in promoting police reform measures. Within a month of the protests, lawmakers introduced more than 150 police reform bills.

Video evidence has played an important role in civil lawsuits in which victims sue the local government for financial restitution. In many cases, individual officers are shielded from civil suits by the doctrine of qualified immunity. This policy protects government officials from being sued unless they explicitly violate a person's well-known constitutional rights.

Critical Thinking Questions

What groups face an increased likelihood of experiencing police brutality? How do you think such disparities can be addressed?

Do you think police officers should be protected from being sued by victims of police brutality? Why or why not?

Under what circumstances, if any, do you think police officers should be allowed to fire their weapons? Explain your answer.

Strategies for Policing Reform

To improve policing and counter allegations of officer misconduct, police departments have turned to video technology. Many police departments have adopted body cameras, also referred to as body worn video (BWV) or Portable Digital Recording Devices (PDRD). These are typically clipped on the officer's shirt. When used properly, body cameras record police interactions with the public. Some officers oppose body cameras. They maintain that their presence interferes with police work. Others have expressed concern about their costs. Proponents, however, assert that body cameras provide an objective account of events. Further, the evidence produced by body cameras could help officers in civil lawsuits. Data on the effectiveness of body cameras at reducing violence is mixed.

Police departments with high rates of excessive force have been urged to adopt more community-based policies. This has sometimes brought community activists and law enforcement groups together to work on different initiatives. The goal is often to cultivate trust between police and the communities they serve. Police may work directly with churches and neighborhood organizations to determine law enforcement priorities. Some additional suggested approaches include training in de-escalation techniques, cultural education, and listening to community members affected by police violence.

Source Citation

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Police brutality refers to the excessive use of force by law enforcement. Officers may use force in certain situations. Deadly force may be justified in self-defense or in the defense of others. However, when the use of force goes beyond what is appropriate for the situation and causes unnecessary pain, safety risks, or death, it may be considered excessive.

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According to a PNAS research article by Frank Edwards, Hedwig Lee, and Michael Espocito: "Police violence is a leading cause of death for young men in the United States. Over the life course, about 1 in every 1,000 black men can expect to be killed by police. Risk of being killed by police peaks between the ages of 20 y and 35 y for men and women and for all racial and ethnic groups." In this quote it talks about how police brutality has been a issue and become a leading cause of death for people from ages 20-35. There are many data that shows both men and women from all racial and ethnic groups that have faced police brutality and have died from it.

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Risk of being killed by police use of force in the United States by age, race–ethnicity, and sex | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

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We use data on police-involved deaths to estimate how the risk of being killed by
police use of force in the United States varies across social gro…

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In this video, protestors from all over the world are coming together to make a change and end racism.

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Black Lives Matter Protests Around the World

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This video shows different scenes from the movie The Hate You Give and shows how society really is.

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In this commercial it shows pictures of people protesting.

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According to a article written by Priyamvada Gopal, in the fifth paragraph it talks about how "white lives matter more", I was repeatedly asked why, if white lives did not matter as white lives, do black lives matter?,'' I don't agree with this, We live in a society where people don't comprehend what over people have went through or what they are going through. Most of this racism that we see does come from white people and its sickening. There's some white people that haven't felt the fear and pain or the position Black people have felt knowing that there's people that could potentially kill them. As well they haven't dealt with racism like Black people have, they haven't experienced being looked badly or the rudeness that someone could say to them.

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When it comes to race and racism, we focus on those at the sharp end of discrimination - from black people routinely subjected to police brutality to people of colour missing from positions of influence. Progressive ideals invoke "inclusion" for ethnic minorities, or special bias training. These measures may be necessary, but they put the focus squarely on those subjected to victimisation - rather than the system that perpetuates racism.

What results is a form of benevolence whereby some people of colour get "included" as part of diversity measures, even as social hierarchies and habits of thought in white-majority societies remain largely unchanged.

The truth is that there is nothing pleasant about confronting the reality of an acute racial hierarchy. If the racial order is really to change - and there are those who don't want it to - it is not just black lives or racial minorities that should be the topic of discussion, but the racial ideology that currently calls the shots in western societies.

This is what brings us to "whiteness" - which is not a biological category so much as a set of ideas and practices about race that has emerged from a bedrock of white supremacy, itself the legacy of empire and slavery. Confronting the idea of whiteness involves far more uncomfortable discussions than "inclusion", especially for people deemed white, since it involves self-examination and acknowledging ugly truths, both historical and contemporary. It is simply easier to try to shut it out or down.

I found this out to my cost last week when I tweeted a response to the racially inflammatory "White Lives Matter" banner flown over the Etihad Stadium after Manchester City and Burnley footballers had "taken the knee" to honour George Floyd. My tweet, deliberately playing with the wording of the banner by qualifying it, made the point that white lives cannot be deemed to matter because they are white, that it should not be whiteness that gives those lives value. In addition to the tsunami of racist sewage that immediately came my way, littered with N-words and P-words along with sexist slurs, rape fantasies, death threats and open declarations that "white lives matter more", I was repeatedly asked why, if white lives did not matter as white lives, do black lives matter? Was that also not also racist?

No, it is not also racist. White lives already matter more than others so to keep proclaiming they matter is to add excess value to them, tilting us dangerously into white supremacy. This doesn't mean that all white people in western societies are materially well-off or don't experience hardship, but that they don't do so by virtue of the fact that they are white. Black lives remain undervalued and in order for us to get to the desirable point where all lives (really do) matter, they must first achieve parity by mattering. It's not really that hard to understand unless you choose not to.

Studies of "whiteness" are not new. Respected scholars, such as the late Noel Ignatiev, author of How the Irish Became White, and David Roediger, have studied the history and sociology of whiteness in great detail. Ignatiev, who was Jewish, wrote about the "abolition of whiteness", not as a call to eliminate white people but a system of racial entitlement that necessarily relied on the exclusion of those deemed to be lesser. For Ignatiev, whiteness was not a biological fact so much as a kind of ideological club where "the members go through life accepting the benefits of membership, without thinking about the cost" to others.

Over time, people have been added to the club and aspire to membership of it, from the Irish and European Jews to many Asians today. One distinctive feature of whiteness as ideology is that it can make itself invisible and thereby make its operations more lethal and harder to challenge. Science and the humanities are largely in accord that "race" is not a biological category, but a way of creating power differentials, which have practical consequences. If that power differential in western societies is to be removed, then the ideology at the top - whiteness - must be abolished. Only then can the abolition of all other racial categories - and the post-racial world we so often claim to espouse - actually follow.

Although in Britain I am racialised as "non-white" or Asian, in my birth country of India I have some experience of what it is like to be a member of a powerful but invisible ruling category. As a Brahmin (the "highest-ranking" tier of the deeply hierarchical Hindu caste system), I belong to a social grouping that operates much like whiteness does. It rules the roost, is not disadvantaged by virtue of caste (though there are those who might suffer from poverty or misogyny), and it treats any challenge to its power as a form of victimisation or "reverse oppression". For the record, there is no such thing: oppression only operates downwards. This is why, at the same time as I reinforced Ignatiev's call for the abolition of "whiteness", I repeated that Brahmin supremacy in India must also be abolished.

One of my less discourteous correspondents last week asked me, using only one expletive, why people "need a manual for race relations" when we could just respect each other. Unfortunately, until we get to a point where all lives really do matter, there is no point in declaring that race doesn't make a difference or that equality exists, when it clearly doesn't. "White lives matter" implicitly suggests whites matter more than others. "Black lives matter" is saying those lives need to matter more than they have, that society needs to give them more weight. Until we square up to the ugly realities of how whiteness operates - lethally, invisibly, powerfully - we are doomed to fighting a toxic and pointless culture war, where the only winners are those who want hatred to prevail.

Source Citation

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We can't talk about racism without understanding whiteness

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When it comes to race and racism, we focus on those at the sharp end of discrimination - from black people routinely subjected to police brutality to people of colour missing from positions of influence. Progressive ideals invoke "inclusion" for ethnic minorities, or special bias training.

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In this picture shows people's fist supporting Black Lives Matter.

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This is a picture of people protesting.

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In this article "Not Us vs. Them': Police March in Unity with Peaceful Protesters'' by Fred Lucas  It talks about how police are marching with peaceful protestors for justice of the killing of George Floyd.  "Camden, New Jersey, Police Chief Joseph Wysocki marched with protesters. Police officers reportedly hugged, prayed, and marched and knelt with protesters in Kansas City, Missouri, and Shreveport, Louisiana.'' In the quote it talks about how many police officers in different states have marched and taken a knee with protestors.

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In this picture shows people protesting and holding a Black Lives Matter flag.

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Black Lives Matter. End racism.

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In this picture shows the names of the innocent people that lost their lives due to police brutality.