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As the George Floyd protests against police violence erupted around the nation, a massive amount of evidence of police brutality was widely captured through social media. Unfortunately, very little of it made it to mainstream outlets until much later.

For days, Twitter and Facebook were filled with videos of heavily armored police forces indiscriminately pepper-spraying marchers, firing flashbangs at crowds containing children and elderly, and shooting projectiles at people standing outside their own homes. Marchers walked away from protests with all manner of bruises and bleeding wounds, and several lost teeth and even eyes to police projectiles. To many of those immersed in the social media environment, looted or burning buildings seemed relatively unimportant compared to the state violence meted out to the population.

Though the first weekend of the protests saw fires, looting and unruly activism, media coverage generally lacked any serious analysis of the abusive police conduct. Media coverage not only demonized legitimate outrage at a broken system, it whitewashed the role police played in spreading violence and chaos. Since some of the protesters committed destructive acts against property, the assumption seemed to be, none of the protesters had human rights.

USA Today ( 5/31/20) ran a piece, "Peaceful Protesters Lament Violence at George Floyd Demonstrations, but Understand the Rage Behind It." The only violence discussed at length was the vandalism, looting and instances of fires set during protests. The piece briefly mentioned tear gas and arrests, but did not include them in its examination of how police "overreact" to peaceful protesters.

The Washington Post ( 6/1/20) and Reuters ( 5/29/20; republished by New York Times, 5/29/20) followed similar patterns, as did a USA Today video ( 5/30/20), titled " George Floyd Death Protesters Spread Violence, Destruction Across U.S. Cities."

A major New York Times article ( 5/28/20) described "skirmishes" with police. The language implied a parity between unarmed protesters and heavily armed and armored militarized police. One of the most common terms used to describe police violent incursions into protesters' space was the benign word "clashes."

Even when outlets described the rampant police violence against protesters, the language used still protected police from scrutiny. Media Matters ( 6/2/20), examining how media headlines sanitized police violence, found multiple uses of passive voice to avoid ascribing agency. For example, instead of declaring that police were targeting journalists, Reuters ( 5/31/20) merely wrote,

Journalists Targeted in Attacks.

Media Matters also found outlets describing inanimate objects committing violence instead of attributing actions to officers. For example, the Independent( 5/31/20) ran the headline, "NYPD Vehicle Rams Crowd of Demonstrators in Brooklyn," while Reuters ( 6/1/20) had "Tear Gas Fired on Protesters Near White House as Trump Speaks."

Even coverage of police abuses sometimes attempted to falsely equate these abuses to protesters' actions. For example, a USA Today ( 5/31/20) story that showcased police attacks on journalists tried to implicate protesters in attacks on journalists, writing, "Members of the news media appeared to be targeted, by police and protesters alike."

The only case presented involving demonstrators was when protesters outside of the White House chased down and yelled obscenities at a Fox News camera crew as they chased them away. No physical violence occurred other than someone throwing water on the crew. For some reason, this minor incident was included in a long list of police using rubber bullets and arbitrary arrest to subdue reporters.

The Intercept ( 6/4/20) ran a piece by Trevor Timm of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, which noted that assaults on journalists have come overwhelmingly from police-83% of the time, according to the Foundation's numbers, not counting dozens of arrests of journalists by police. At least some of the remaining assaults were not by protesters, Timm noted, citing an attack on Philadelphia TV reporter Jon Ehrens by "what appears to be police-aligned white nationalists."

Slate ( 5/31/20) was one of the first outlets to focus on police violence as its own phenomenon in a headline "Police Erupt in Violence Nationwide." This article included some of the ample evidence of police violence widely distributed through social media.

Perhaps the increasingly overt abuses of journalists prompted outlets to be more critical of police. In one high-profile incident, CNN reporter Omar Jimenez and his crew were arrested on live TV despite clearly identifying themselves as press. Another incident saw a local news crew clearly and deliberately targeted with pepper balls by police. These incidents, along with days of massive social media backlash against police violence, likely contributed to the broader refocus on law enforcement abuses over the course of several days.

By mid-week, outlets were starting to bring serious attention to police violence. The New York Times ( 6/4/20) published an editorial headlined ""Mayor de Blasio, Open Your Eyes. The Police Are Out of Control," with a subhead reading, "This Is Not What Serving and Protecting Should Look Like." Newsweek ( 6/4/20) ran a piece centering state violence, headlined "Protest Leaders Largely Calm Amid Unrest as Police Violence Tests Mayors and Governors." Pieces from the Washington Post (e.g., 6/6/20) also show increased scrutiny of police brutality.

Critical coverage of police tactics has an enormous effect on how elected officials and police officers view abuses by their forces. The threat of negative representation in the media puts pressure on them to seriously address abuses-at least the obvious abuses caught on camera. Even after many mayors indicated that abuses wouldn't be immediately dealt with early in the week, cracks in that facade are beginning to appear.

On Sunday, a veto-proof majority of the Minneapolis city council pledged to disband the city's police department, asserting that it can not be reformed. House Democrats on Monday put forth a bill to address (rather timidly) some complaints about police.

Two officers involved in forcefully knocking down and injuring a 75-year-old man, then lying about it, have been suspended from the Buffalo Police Department. Six Atlanta police were booked on charges involving excessive force after tasing and dragging two college students out of their car; a Philadelphia police commander was charged with aggravated assault for bludgeoning another student in the head. Only sustained media attention to such abuses will create the conditions for ongoing calls for justice to be answered.

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Media are slowly starting to be serious about police violence | MR Online

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As the George Floyd protests against police violence erupted around the nation, a massive amount of evidence of police brutality was widely captured through social media. Unfortunately, very little of it made it to mainstream outlets until much later.

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Already in 2023, law enforcement officers have killed at least seven unarmed, identified civilians, according to data compiled by the Washington Post and other sources. At least three of the victims were Black, and some, like Nichols, were killed in manners besides shooting

Jan. 3
Keenan Anderson, 31
Los Angeles, California

Jan. 10
Christopher Lee Mercurio, 50
Valencia, California

Jan. 17
Darryl Tyree Williams, 32
Raleigh, North Carolina

Jan. 18
Jackson Lieber, 21
Liberty Hill, Texas

Jan. 24
Billy DeWayne Couch, 51
Gordon County, Georgia

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The year is brand new, and civilian killings by police officers continue unabated. In 2022, police killed at least 1,192 people, the highest number ever recorded, according to the Mapping Police Violence database. A hundred of those people were unarmed. Black people were three times more likely than white people to be killed, although they were 1.3 times more likely to be unarmed.

As the first month of 2023 draws to a close, the nation is once again confronting the tragedy of a killing at the hands of men who pledged to protect and serve their community. On Jan. 7, five Memphis Police officers severely beat 29-year-old Tyre Nichols during a traffic stop in Memphis, Tennessee. He died three days later of his injuries. The officers responsible have been fired and charged with his murder. Police body camera footage showed Nichols repeatedly calling out for his mom as officers beat him with batons and kicked him so hard they almost fell over. When the footage was released last Friday, protests sprang up in cities across the nation with activists demanding police reform. After Nichols' death, President Biden called for better policing practices, saying in a statement, "To deliver real change, we must have accountability when law enforcement officers violate their oaths, and we need to build lasting trust between law enforcement ... and the communities they are sworn to serve and protect."

For years, before the murder of George Floyd in 2020, before the killing of Michael Brown in 2014, activists have said our method of policing is failing. Margaret Huang, President and CEO of the Southern Poverty Law Center, tells Rolling Stone the system is "irreparably broken" and needs to be overhauled. "None of us are free while this system endures," Huang says. "And it is not enough to condemn the brutality; the killing must stop. The deep and violent legacy of policing has claimed too many lives. Public officials must urgently reimagine public safety, dismantle the foundations of white supremacy and racism, and lift up the needs and values of communities served."

Already in 2023, law enforcement officers have killed at least seven unarmed, identified civilians, according to data compiled by the Washington Post and other sources. At least three of the victims were Black, and some, like Nichols, were killed in manners besides shooting. One death was a traffic accident, and two died after being tased by law enforcement officers. Some of these killings never caught the kind of attention Nichols' did. Here's a look at six other unarmed victims of fatal interactions with police officers since 2023 began.

Jan. 3
Keenan Anderson, 31
Los Angeles, California

Anderson, a high school teacher, first interacted with the police because he flagged down an officer for help after he'd been in a traffic accident. Police said he was "exhibiting erratic behavior," and body camera footage of the incident showed him pacing back and forth and telling the officer, "Somebody's trying to kill me," and repeatedly asking the officer to help him. The officer asked him to stay on the sidewalk, after which he attempted to run away from the scene. Multiple Los Angeles Police Department officers pursued him, tackled him, and began struggling with him to put him in handcuffs. As officers held him down, one used a taser on him. Anderson, a Black man, called out, "They're trying to George Floyd me!" Anderson died hours later in the hospital from a reported heart attack. His killing renewed calls for police reform in Los Angeles. LAPD's Force Investigation Division is investigating the incident, and attorneys for Anderson's five-year-old son have filed a $50 million lawsuit against the city. The LAPD said the taser was only activated one time, followed by a series of less intense "dry stuns," and that the department has reduced the use of tasers by 20 percent over the past five years.

Jan. 10
Christopher Lee Mercurio, 50
Valencia, California

Mercurio, identified by the coroner's office as "a transient," was fatally shot outside a Macy's department store by a Santa Clarita Valley Sheriff's deputy. Police arrived at the Valencia Mall after a security guard reported a trespasser who would not leave the property. Mercurio, whose race was not specified by authorities, then "assaulted" a deputy, according to a sheriff's department statement, and an officer shot him. Both Mercurio and the deputy involved in the altercation were transported to the hospital. Mercurio was pronounced dead, and the deputy was treated for injuries to his face. The Justice Department is investigating the incident.

Jan. 17
Darryl Tyree Williams, 32
Raleigh, North Carolina

Six Raleigh police officers were placed on administrative leave after the death of Williams, who died hours after officers tased him during an arrest for drug possession. Police allege Williams, who was Black, resisted being handcuffed, then fled, after which they deployed a taser twice in "drive stun mode," a less intense usage where the Taser is held against a person's body rather than deploying projectiles. Williams told officers, "I have heart problems," according to an internal police department report based on unreleased body camera footage. While waiting for EMS, Williams became unresponsive without a pulse. Officers said they initiated CPR, but he did not respond to lifesaving attempts by police or medical responders. The North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation and the Raleigh Police Internal Affairs Unit are investigating. Following his death, organizers protested at a city council meeting, calling for justice for Williams.

Jan. 18
Jackson Lieber, 21
Liberty Hill, Texas

Police officers fatally shot Lieber, a white man whose family lawyer described as the valedictorian of his high school class, after a witness reported him trespassing on someone's property in the middle of the afternoon. Lieber had reportedly driven off the road and crashed his car in somebody's front yard, then "wandered onto that property," according to authorities, where he allegedly got into a physical fight with multiple members of the household. He was shot after an altercation with the responding officer, police have stated. Lieber's family is demanding transparency from police and answers about what went wrong, and the Texas Rangers are investigating the incident.

Jan. 23
Jaahnavi Kandula, 23
Seattle, Washington

Kandula, a graduate student from India studying at Northeastern University, was struck by a police car around 8 p.m. while she was crossing the street. The Seattle Police Department said Kandula was in the crosswalk and that the officer, driving a marked patrol car, was responding to a reported medical emergency at the time. Kandula's uncle, who lives in Houston, flew to Washington to return her body to her mother in India in the wake of the accident. He told the Seattle Times he was "in shock" when he heard the news and that Kandula had traveled to the United States with the ultimate goal "to help her family." After Kandula's death, activists gathered at the intersection to protest police violence. The incident is under investigation by the Seattle Police Department's Traffic Collision Investigation Squad, not as a use of force incident. A SPT spokesperson told the Seattle Times, "At this point in the investigation, we have no reason to believe the officer intended to hit that woman." The officer driving the car has not been placed on leave. Police have said they performed CPR at the scene while waiting for the fire department, which took over lifesaving measures when they arrived. Kandula was taken to the hospital in critical condition but died soon thereafter. The police department extended condolence to Kandula's family and friends, saying in a statement, "This incident is a terrible tragedy for everyone involved."

Jan. 24
Billy DeWayne Couch, 51
Gordon County, Georgia

Couch was shot and killed during a traffic stop. Around 1 a.m., authorities said deputies tried to pull Couch's truck over, but he sped away and drove behind a house, where the deputies blocked him in. They said Couch, who was white, ignored commands to show his hands as he got out of his truck and the sheriff's office reportedly said he ran off after getting out of the vehicle. At some point, a deputy shot him. Authorities have not released more specific details, but the Georgia Bureau of Investigation is probing the incident.

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The Year Just Started and Cops Have Already Killed At Least 7 Unarmed People

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In addition to Tyre Nichols, whose beating death prompted nationwide protests, at least half a dozen identified, unarmed people have been killed by police in 2023

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I grew up, police violence, including the killing of an unarmed black teen-ager in San Francisco, prompted the organization, in October, 1966, of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense.
When the Panthers moved into community service and focussed on programs such as free breakfasts for children and public health, women like Ericka Huggins came to the fore. Today’s anti-racist activism, led by women, is beautifully feminist and eschews macho posturing.
he B.P.P. announced a Ten-Point Program of goals for social and economic justice, which surely inspired Black Lives Matter’s six-point platform of demands half a century later, and, as it matured, adopted an anti-colonial, internationalist stance. Nonetheless, armed opposition to police brutality remained the Panthers’ heart and soul, the mission that attracted thousands into their ranks. Social and economic justice and the Panthers’ (legally carried) guns sounded like communism to J. Edgar Hoover’s F.B.I., which soon designated the B.P.P. a threat to national security. F.B.I. surveillance and infiltration, together with killings at the hands of the local police, helped destroy the organization by the early nineteen-eighties.

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We can see by now that the anti-police-brutality protests of 2020 differ profoundly from those of the nineteen-sixties. And I do mean . We're seeing many protesters who are not black and marches in more places: large, small, urban, rural. These are protests ignited by seeing, seeing horrific videos of criminal acts again and again and again.

The very fact of the sameness of police brutality then and police brutality now intensifies an anger that remains totally justified. In the sixties, the Black Panther Party arose to confront police brutality, and the Panthers created a visual archive of justified outrage. Today's protesters know that their actions and the images they create will enter the political history of confronting injustice. This has not been the case for anti-police-brutality imagery created a half century ago. We still haven't fully seen the art made by those twentieth-century angry black artists.

Back then, in California's Bay Area, where I grew up, police violence, including the killing of an unarmed black teen-ager in San Francisco, prompted the organization, in October, 1966, of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. The late Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, students at Merritt College, in Oakland, bonded in reaction to an exclusionary version of California history that was being taught at the school. Then, as now, lily-white history was a part of the ideology supporting white-supremacist police.

I belong to Newton and Seale's generation, and I supported the B.P.P.'s denunciation of brutal police. But I never joined up, for reasons geographical (I lived in Temescal, in North Oakland, next to Berkeley, where Kamala Harris grew up) and gendered (the B.P.P.'s gun-toting, masculinist self-fashioning). When the Panthers moved into community service and focussed on programs such as free breakfasts for children and public health, women like Ericka Huggins came to the fore. Today's anti-racist activism, led by women, is beautifully feminist and eschews macho posturing.

The B.P.P. announced a Ten-Point Program of goals for social and economic justice, which surely inspired Black Lives Matter's six-point platform of demands half a century later, and, as it matured, adopted an anti-colonial, internationalist stance. Nonetheless, armed opposition to police brutality remained the Panthers' heart and soul, the mission that attracted thousands into their ranks. Social and economic justice and the Panthers' (legally carried) guns sounded like communism to J. Edgar Hoover's F.B.I., which soon designated the B.P.P. a threat to national security. F.B.I. surveillance and infiltration, together with killings at the hands of the local police, helped destroy the organization by the early nineteen-eighties.

Images were central to the Black Panther Party's self-fashioning and mark its place in history. One of the best known is a photograph of Seale and Newton in black berets and leather jackets, carrying guns, standing outside the Black Panther Party storefront headquarters in Oakland. A group of Panthers had been photographed carrying guns into the California state capitol building, in Sacramento, to protest gun-control measures attempting to curb their then existing right to carry arms openly. It is likely that Howard L. Bingham took this photo, which served as a recruiting poster, because he took many other photographs of the Black Panthers. (In 2009, he published a collection of these photos titled "Howard L. Bingham's Black Panthers 1968." Bingham died in 2016.) The image of black men enacting armed self-defense now resonates as a counterweight to heavily armed white nationalists around the U.S.A. demanding an end to public-health regulations meant to contain the coronavirus pandemic.

Bingham's photographs capture Panther activities in a documentary spirit. More intriguing to me now is the agitprop artwork of Emory Douglas, the B.P.P. Minister of Culture, which was published in the The Black Panther newspaper and plastered around the Bay Area as posters. Week after week, Douglas's searing wit visualized the urgency for action, such as this image of children carrying photographs, one that shows police victimizing a child:

Armed women and mothers appeared frequently in Douglas's work, protecting their children and wearing natural hair. In this drawing, the police are shown as agents of an unjust system of property owning:

Inspired by graphic design, woodcuts in particular, Douglas used bold black lines and often just one color. He combined patterns like Ben-Day dots and parallel lines, and added shading and layers to flattened images.

Douglas also popularized "pigs" as the epithet for policemen, and he would show "pigs" singularly or in twos or threes, to represent not only local police but also the economic and political forces of war, Nixon, capitalism, and colonialism. The big-bellied "pig" character was often drunken and banged up, an emblem of the abuse of power; one image defined him as "a low natured beast that has no regard for law, justice, or the rights of people . . . a foul, depraved traducer, usually found masquerading as the victim of an unprovoked attack."

Right now, we are angry because police brutality and racism are so old, and they keep on happening. Art history needs to help us remember that our anger is not new, that half a century ago an organization and its artist confronted racial injustice resolutely.

Douglas's work belongs to American political history, but it should also figure in the history of twentieth-century American art. His body of work is one of several oeuvres needlessly missing from the art-history canon. Among the missing, Charles White comes to mind immediately. My own narrative history, " Creating Black Americans: African-American History and Its Meanings, 1619 to the Present," is not an art history but contains a great deal of black art. Looking there, I find other vital works by Elizabeth Catlett, Jeff Donaldson, and Pat Ward Williams. The work of Betye Saar, Faith Ringgold, and Howardena Pindell, artists now in their deep maturity, who are also in "Creating Black Americans," is only now becoming widely visible.

Here is the art history for the moment that we are in, work that addresses themes of anti-black violence and armed self-defense. Once this moment passes, we will need an accessible art history of righteous anger, as opposed to one that exiles these images to the margins. Why aren't these works part of the art-history canon? Some of the answer lies in the definitions of fine art that prevailed during the twentieth century, when this art was made. A pertinent example is the cranky, conservative, influential Times art critic Hilton Kramer, who called black art merely "social history" lacking "stringent esthetic criteria." When I was a student in art school, in the early two-thousands, I still encountered such judgments. Art was supposed to be "autonomous," speaking only to itself; engaged, activist art was dismissed as mere illustration.

Right now, the art-history canon presents the nineteen-sixties as Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, in images that depict an America without racial conflict and that celebrate consumer capitalism. Angry art inhabits a peculiar category of the art of protest, one peripheral to the history of American art. Let us recuperate the art that testifies to a long-standing, uncompromising opposition to police brutality. This furious art belongs not only to anti-racist heritage but also in the center of American art.

The nineteen-sixties art world, like American society at large, was so segregated that the absence of black artists in galleries and museums was business as usual. That color bar gave rise to anti-racist art organizations like Spiral, the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, in New York, and the National Center of Afro-American Artists, in Boston, all intended to lower racial barriers. The hard work of these institutions has weakened art-world exclusion and discredited the outmoded distinction between art and social criticism. Today, the work of younger black and engaged artists has been widely appreciated as art history. But the twentieth-century anti-racist art by Emory Douglas and others inspired by the Black Panther Party and Black Power has hardly been rediscovered. It has not made its way into the art-historical canon, which conveys both monetary and cultural value. Douglas's work is more easily found on tote bags being sold on behalf of Black Lives Matter than in the high-priced galleries and auctions that still decree which art matters.

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essays and commentary on race and racism

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We can see by now that the anti-police-brutality protests of 2020 differ profoundly from those of the nineteen-sixties. And I do mean . We're seeing many protesters who are not black and marches in more places: large, small, urban, rural. These are protests ignited by seeing, seeing horrific videos of criminal acts again and again and again.

# data[].attributes.body
We can see by now that the anti-police-brutality protests of 2020 differ profoundly from those of the nineteen-sixties. And I do mean see. We’re seeing many protesters who are not black and marches in more places: large, small, urban, rural. These are protests ignited by seeing, seeing horrific videos of criminal acts again and again and again.

The very fact of the sameness of police brutality then and police brutality now intensifies an anger that remains totally justified. In the sixties, the Black Panther Party arose to confront police brutality, and the Panthers created a visual archive of justified outrage. Today’s protesters know that their actions and the images they create will enter the political history of confronting injustice.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
We can see by now that the anti-police-brutality protests of 2020 differ profoundly from those of the nineteen-sixties. And I do mean . We're seeing many protesters who are not black and marches in more places: large, small, urban, rural. These are protests ignited by seeing, seeing horrific videos of criminal acts again and again and again.

The very fact of the sameness of police brutality then and police brutality now intensifies an anger that remains totally justified. In the sixties, the Black Panther Party arose to confront police brutality, and the Panthers created a visual archive of justified outrage. Today's protesters know that their actions and the images they create will enter the political history of confronting injustice. This has not been the case for anti-police-brutality imagery created a half century ago. We still haven't fully seen the art made by those twentieth-century angry black artists.

Back then, in California's Bay Area, where I grew up, police violence, including the killing of an unarmed black teen-ager in San Francisco, prompted the organization, in October, 1966, of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. The late Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, students at Merritt College, in Oakland, bonded in reaction to an exclusionary version of California history that was being taught at the school. Then, as now, lily-white history was a part of the ideology supporting white-supremacist police.

I belong to Newton and Seale's generation, and I supported the B.P.P.'s denunciation of brutal police. But I never joined up, for reasons geographical (I lived in Temescal, in North Oakland, next to Berkeley, where Kamala Harris grew up) and gendered (the B.P.P.'s gun-toting, masculinist self-fashioning). When the Panthers moved into community service and focussed on programs such as free breakfasts for children and public health, women like Ericka Huggins came to the fore. Today's anti-racist activism, led by women, is beautifully feminist and eschews macho posturing.

The B.P.P. announced a Ten-Point Program of goals for social and economic justice, which surely inspired Black Lives Matter's six-point platform of demands half a century later, and, as it matured, adopted an anti-colonial, internationalist stance. Nonetheless, armed opposition to police brutality remained the Panthers' heart and soul, the mission that attracted thousands into their ranks. Social and economic justice and the Panthers' (legally carried) guns sounded like communism to J. Edgar Hoover's F.B.I., which soon designated the B.P.P. a threat to national security. F.B.I. surveillance and infiltration, together with killings at the hands of the local police, helped destroy the organization by the early nineteen-eighties.

Images were central to the Black Panther Party's self-fashioning and mark its place in history. One of the best known is a photograph of Seale and Newton in black berets and leather jackets, carrying guns, standing outside the Black Panther Party storefront headquarters in Oakland. A group of Panthers had been photographed carrying guns into the California state capitol building, in Sacramento, to protest gun-control measures attempting to curb their then existing right to carry arms openly. It is likely that Howard L. Bingham took this photo, which served as a recruiting poster, because he took many other photographs of the Black Panthers. (In 2009, he published a collection of these photos titled "Howard L. Bingham's Black Panthers 1968." Bingham died in 2016.) The image of black men enacting armed self-defense now resonates as a counterweight to heavily armed white nationalists around the U.S.A. demanding an end to public-health regulations meant to contain the coronavirus pandemic.

Bingham's photographs capture Panther activities in a documentary spirit. More intriguing to me now is the agitprop artwork of Emory Douglas, the B.P.P. Minister of Culture, which was published in the The Black Panther newspaper and plastered around the Bay Area as posters. Week after week, Douglas's searing wit visualized the urgency for action, such as this image of children carrying photographs, one that shows police victimizing a child:

Armed women and mothers appeared frequently in Douglas's work, protecting their children and wearing natural hair. In this drawing, the police are shown as agents of an unjust system of property owning:

Inspired by graphic design, woodcuts in particular, Douglas used bold black lines and often just one color. He combined patterns like Ben-Day dots and parallel lines, and added shading and layers to flattened images.

Douglas also popularized "pigs" as the epithet for policemen, and he would show "pigs" singularly or in twos or threes, to represent not only local police but also the economic and political forces of war, Nixon, capitalism, and colonialism. The big-bellied "pig" character was often drunken and banged up, an emblem of the abuse of power; one image defined him as "a low natured beast that has no regard for law, justice, or the rights of people . . . a foul, depraved traducer, usually found masquerading as the victim of an unprovoked attack."

Right now, we are angry because police brutality and racism are so old, and they keep on happening. Art history needs to help us remember that our anger is not new, that half a century ago an organization and its artist confronted racial injustice resolutely.

Douglas's work belongs to American political history, but it should also figure in the history of twentieth-century American art. His body of work is one of several oeuvres needlessly missing from the art-history canon. Among the missing, Charles White comes to mind immediately. My own narrative history, " Creating Black Americans: African-American History and Its Meanings, 1619 to the Present," is not an art history but contains a great deal of black art. Looking there, I find other vital works by Elizabeth Catlett, Jeff Donaldson, and Pat Ward Williams. The work of Betye Saar, Faith Ringgold, and Howardena Pindell, artists now in their deep maturity, who are also in "Creating Black Americans," is only now becoming widely visible.

Here is the art history for the moment that we are in, work that addresses themes of anti-black violence and armed self-defense. Once this moment passes, we will need an accessible art history of righteous anger, as opposed to one that exiles these images to the margins. Why aren't these works part of the art-history canon? Some of the answer lies in the definitions of fine art that prevailed during the twentieth century, when this art was made. A pertinent example is the cranky, conservative, influential Times art critic Hilton Kramer, who called black art merely "social history" lacking "stringent esthetic criteria." When I was a student in art school, in the early two-thousands, I still encountered such judgments. Art was supposed to be "autonomous," speaking only to itself; engaged, activist art was dismissed as mere illustration.

Right now, the art-history canon presents the nineteen-sixties as Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, in images that depict an America without racial conflict and that celebrate consumer capitalism. Angry art inhabits a peculiar category of the art of protest, one peripheral to the history of American art. Let us recuperate the art that testifies to a long-standing, uncompromising opposition to police brutality. This furious art belongs not only to anti-racist heritage but also in the center of American art.

The nineteen-sixties art world, like American society at large, was so segregated that the absence of black artists in galleries and museums was business as usual. That color bar gave rise to anti-racist art organizations like Spiral, the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, in New York, and the National Center of Afro-American Artists, in Boston, all intended to lower racial barriers. The hard work of these institutions has weakened art-world exclusion and discredited the outmoded distinction between art and social criticism. Today, the work of younger black and engaged artists has been widely appreciated as art history. But the twentieth-century anti-racist art by Emory Douglas and others inspired by the Black Panther Party and Black Power has hardly been rediscovered. It has not made its way into the art-historical canon, which conveys both monetary and cultural value. Douglas's work is more easily found on tote bags being sold on behalf of Black Lives Matter than in the high-priced galleries and auctions that still decree which art matters.

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essays and commentary on race and racism

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We can see by now that the anti-police-brutality protests of 2020 differ profoundly from those of the nineteen-sixties. And I do mean . We're seeing many protesters who are not black and marches in more places: large, small, urban, rural. These are protests ignited by seeing, seeing horrific videos of criminal acts again and again and again.

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Black and brown people’s privacy is targeted via stop and frisks, they fear coercion and violence if they remain silent, and they are arrested at high rates because officers find it suspicious when they are in groups. They are considered “suspicious” simply because of the color of their skin. U.S. police forces have been used to control and repress marginalized communities for centuries and their practices are ongoing.

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For years, Black people have been advocating for justice for those murdered by the police and for a systematic reform of police. It seems like many people are finally listening. Around the world, including in the U.S., Belgium, Britain, South Korea, Australia, Liberia, and Brazil, people are showing their solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement by protesting and taking down Confederate and colonialist monuments. In this propitious moment, it is important to look to the history and evolution of racism and violence in law enforcement to inform our activism.

Police brutality is not unique to the U.S.: Countries including Brazil, India, Jamaica, and China have problems with police brutality. The Unitarian Universalist Office at the United Nations and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights have recognized that racially based police brutality is an international issue. The United Nations Centre for Human Rights created the International Human Rights Standards for Law Enforcement, which countries like the U.S. and Brazil are in conflict with. American and Brazilian police violate the UN's standards that restraint must be exercised, damage and injury must be minimized, and force should only be used when strictly necessary. In the U.S., 1,000 people are killed by police every year and in 2019, Brazil's police were responsible for 1,810 deaths.

Countries like France, the U.S., the UK, and Brazil violate, to various degrees, the UN's standards for non-discrimination by disproportionately killing, incarcerating, and/or stopping Black people. Brazilian police are responsible for 1/5 of all the murders in the country, and the majority of the victims are Black. U.S. police departments discriminate based on race when enforcing the law and do not afford equal protection under the law for all citizens. The UK police force has a racially biased database that is used to target people for stops. In France, young Black men are reportedly 20 times more likely to be stopped by police. While many countries have a history of slavery, the police departments in both Brazil and the U.S. came directly out of organizations created to control enslaved people.

History and Race

To understand the way racism manifests in modern police departments, we must look at their history. Modern police departments in the U.S. originated from slave patrols and other bodies that policed the more marginalized groups in society. Slave patrols started in South Carolina in 1704 and by the late 1700s, they were ubiquitous in the South. Armed with whips, ropes, and guns, slave patrols captured, punished, and returned those who had escaped bondage. They beat and intimidated enslaved people to prevent uprisings and to ensure they abided by plantation rules. Similarly, Brazilian police departments were originally created for the purpose of preventing slaves from organizing an uprising.

In the U.S., Northern and Midwestern police forces emerged in the early 1800s. The city of St Louis established "Indian Constables" to police neighboring Indigenous groups. The St Louis Police Department grew out of this group. Northern cities experienced an influx of immigrants from Germany and Ireland. These new immigrant groups and more established immigrant groups clashed, leading to an increase in crime. According to Dr. Gary Potter from Eastern Kentucky University, merchants were concerned about how the new social unrest and crime might affect their businesses and lobbied for the creation of public police forces. Once established, they mainly served to enforce laws that protected the merchant class (i.e. the suppression of riots, strikes, and protests). Police began arresting people for public drunkenness, which disproportionately impacted the working class since they lived in small apartments and preferred to drink in the pubs. Already, the police were prioritizing the enforcement of laws most likely to be broken by the working class. Police forces of the 1800s were infamous for taking bribes from politicians and others to look the other way when laws were broken. Just like the slave patrols of the South, the police forces' main function was to police the working class that, in large part, consisted of Black people and immigrants.

After the Civil War, slave patrols seamlessly transitioned into public police forces. Police were known to be involved with vigilante groups like the Ku Klux Klan, which emerged to continue to police Black people through lynching and other violent acts. Furthermore, police in the South were responsible for enforcing Jim Crow laws. They met Civil Rights protesters with excessive force, including attack dogs and high force firehoses. Black people would be met with police brutality if they were found violating Jim Crow laws. Police often failed to prosecute, investigate, or otherwise intervene in the brutal killing, torture, and lynching of Black men and women. This was just 60 years ago, and the mistreatment of Black and brown people by the police continues.

U.S. police departments' excessive use of force disproportionately impacts people of color, especially Black people. 24% of people killed by police are Black even though they only make up 13% of the population. A study conducted at Stanford University found that Black people are more likely than white people to be pulled over while driving and they are more likely to have those stops escalate to a search of their car. This disparity drops off at night, presumably because officers are no longer able to easily discern the race of motorists.

The U.S. prides itself on our respect for individual liberties, but in practice, these rights are not always respected for marginalized communities. A study conducted by researchers from Yale and Johns Hopkins found that Black Americans' experiences in areas that are highly policed are similar to the experiences of people in more authoritarian countries in Asia and Africa, nations to which we should not be proud to be compared. According to the law, all Americans have equal rights to privacy, to remain silent, and to assemble. In practice, however, Black and brown people's privacy is targeted via stop and frisks, they fear coercion and violence if they remain silent, and they are arrested at high rates because officers find it suspicious when they are in groups. They are considered "suspicious" simply because of the color of their skin. U.S. police forces have been used to control and repress marginalized communities for centuries and their practices are ongoing.

Militarization and Enforcement

Armed police forces are nothing new, but now police departments in the U.S. have become more militarized, meaning they are implementing military tactics, attitudes, and weaponry. Other countries, including Brazil, China, France, and Mexico, have militarized police forces as well. It has been proven that the militarization of police forces leads to more violent actions from officers. Militarization heightens the tensions between civilians and the police, while making the police more deadly.

In the U.S., from 1980-2000, there has been a 1,500% increase in the number of Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams in police departments, providing those departments with higher caliber guns, grenades, armored cars, and other military grade weapons. Initially, these were supposed to be used in "extraordinary, emergency situations," but the War on Drugs and the War on Terror made these resources more widely available. There are 50,000 SWAT raids every year in the U.S.: 137 times every day. 80% of these raids are for the sake of executing a search warrant, meaning they are looking for evidence to prove the person has committed a crime. Out of all the raids, 60% are for suspected drug crimes. These raids are not affecting all Americans equally. 68% of SWAT raids against Black and Latinx people are for suspected drug crimes while only 38% of SWAT raids against white people are for suspected drug crimes. The excessive force used in SWAT raids has resulted in the deaths of children, even infants. This is how Breonna Taylor was killed. SWAT teams should not be used unless absolutely necessary because of the increased risk of killing or seriously injuring unsuspecting inhabitants.

7,000 different police agencies across the U.S. have obtained military gear from the Pentagon through the 1033 Program. This gear is subsidized by taxpayers and each agency is able to use these supplies and tactics with little oversight and accountability. Police departments with low rates of crime are acquiring millions of dollars' worth of equipment like assault rifles, armored trucks, and Kevlar helmets. Once the equipment has been given to an agency, the federal government does not evaluate how it is being used.

The military and the police ought to have two very different goals. The military's tactics are suited for fighting foreign foes. The police ostensibly exist to protect and serve the members of the community. They are meant to enforce the law, which includes citizens' right to assemble and protest. Wearing and using military gear is inappropriate for regular police work. Researchers found that citizens feel much more comfortable and willing to approach police officers dressed in traditional uniforms as opposed to military uniforms. Trust is integral to a successful police force. There needs to be trust for people to be willing to call on and cooperate with police in the event of a crime. Trust, not fear, should color the relationships between citizens and police officers.

The relationship between citizens and police is further eroded when public officials talk about protesters using the language of war, including the U.S. President referring to peaceful protesters as terrorists. The head of the largest police union in NYC said, "we will win this war on New York City. ... It's good against evil and good always wins." Peaceful protest is an act of patriotism, not terrorism.

Solving the excessive use of force and institutional racism latent in our law enforcement agencies will not be easy. The UUA President Susan Frederick-Gray has asked Unitarian Universalists-especially white UUs who tend to be resistant to such issues-to open our minds to defunding the police and investing in social services for Black people, Indigenous people, and people of color. The Black Lives Matter movement has been working for years to advocate for change and solve this problem. Their demands and perspective can be found here.

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Racially based police brutality and police militarization is an international problem.

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Racially based police brutality and police militarization is an international problem.

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https://www.aclu.org/news/criminal-law-reform/the-biden-administrations-executive-order-on-policing-is-a-foundation-to-build-upon

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Rachael Eisenberg, Kate Kahan, Nicole Lee Ndumele, Udi Ofer

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The Biden Administration’s Executive Order on Policing is a Foundation to Build Upon | News & Commentary | American Civil Liberties Union

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Two years after the murder of George Floyd, a new executive order on police reform offers a starting place, but does not go far enough.

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https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/02/07/fact-sheet-the-biden-harris-administrations-work-to-make-our-communities-safer-and-advance-effective-accountable-policing/#:~:text=The%20order%20requires%20federal%20law,submit%20officer%20misconduct%20records%20into

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FACT SHEET: The Biden-Harris Administration’s Work to Make Our Communities Safer and Advance Effective, Accountable Policing | The White House

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A young Black man should not have to fear for his life when stopped for an alleged traffic violation. And no one should have to put their life on the line to stop a mass shooter. At the State of the Union, Mrs. RowVaughn Wells and Mr. Rodney Wells, Tyre Nichols’ mother and stepfather, will…

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https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2021/08/un-experts-call-end-police-brutality-worldwide

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Data on policing is notoriously terrible," said Casey Delehanty, a political scientist at Gardner-Webb University in North Carolina. "It's very spotty. It's unreliable and often inaccurate, and this has really precluded a lot of study and understanding and also accountability in real-time of local, state and federal police."
Even when the government does keep data, it's incomplete and often held on laughably out-of-date technology. In the summer 2019, Delehanty embarked on an effort to get raw data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Uniform Crime Reporting Database.
Police department data should be accessible through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which allows citizens to request records from public agencies.track the problem

Both Delehanty and Lawson have found that police departments with more military equipment from the 1033 program kill more people.  A department with no new equipment in a year could expect 0.068 fewer suspect deaths in the following 365 days. A department with the most new requisitions could expect 0.188 more deaths. The researchers even found a similar increase in police killings of dogs, suggesting that cops weren't necessarily gearing up for big, casualty-heavy raids with their requisitions. They were simply becoming more violent in general. Demilitarize

Change police culture

Training is often cited as a way to reduce racial biases among police officers and encourage de-escalation. Some training methods have evidence to back them up. For example, training in procedural justice, which focuses on fairness, was shown in one randomized experiment to reduce police officers' likelihood of ending encounters with arrests or using force, according to a 2018 study published in the journal
There are regulatory ways to change police culture. A report by Sinyangwe released in 2016 for the Use of Force Project found that in departments that adopt more of eight policies that limit how police can use force the police kill fewer civilians. For the report, Sinyangwe looked at records from 94 of the nation's largest municipal police departments.

These policies include:

1. Requiring officers to de-escalate before using force;
2. Using guidelines defining the types of force that can be used to respond to specific situations;
3. Restricting or banning chokeholds and strangleholds;
4. Requiring a verbal warning before using deadly force;
5. Prohibiting officers from shooting at moving vehicles except in extreme circumstances;
6. Requiring officers to exhaust other options before resorting to deadly force;
7. Establishing a duty by officers to intervene if one of their colleagues is using excessive force;
8. Requiring officers to report all uses of force or attempted use of force.

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(Image credit: CHANDAN KHANNA/AFP via Getty Images)

Cities across the U.S. have been rocked by nightly protests against police brutality following the May 25 killing of a Black Minneapolis man named George Floyd by a White police officer.

And as videos proliferate of police arresting or tear gassing seemingly peaceful protestors, the issues raised by the protestors seem more insurmountable than ever. But researchers and activists say that solutions are no mystery: Evidence-based changes to policy around policing can reduce deaths at the hands of the police. These steps alone can't end racism overnight or erase the myriad inequalities in American society, but they can save lives.

Here's what the science says on how to combat police bias and killings: This is not a comprehensive list of suggested reforms, or even of suggested reforms that have been researched. And some ideas, such as defunding police departments, have yet to be thoroughly studied because they have not been tried on a widespread basis.

1. Track the problem

There is no comprehensive government clearinghouse for data on police killings or police use of force. After the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, several private and nonprofit groups began keeping their own databases. These include Mapping Police Violence, an effort led by data scientist and activist Samuel Sinyangwe, Fatal Encounters, a catalog by journalist D. Brian Burghart, and efforts like the Washington Post's Fatal Force database.
Related: The fury in US cities is rooted in a long history of racist policing, violence and inequality
Thanks to databases like these, it's clear that Black people are killed at a disproportionate rate by police officers, making up 24% of deaths despite being only 13% of the population, according to Mapping Police Violence. But the databases rely on media reports of deaths, not police department, city, state or government data, for the simple reason that many police departments are not forthcoming with this information.

"Data on policing is notoriously terrible," said Casey Delehanty, a political scientist at Gardner-Webb University in North Carolina. "It's very spotty. It's unreliable and often inaccurate, and this has really precluded a lot of study and understanding and also accountability in real-time of local, state and federal police."

Even when the government does keep data, it's incomplete and often held on laughably out-of-date technology. In the summer 2019, Delehanty embarked on an effort to get raw data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Uniform Crime Reporting Database. The email provided by the FBI for researchers to request data bounced back. The phone number for researchers led to a phone tree that automatically hung up after Delehanty picked the academic option. He finally reached a person by using the field office's media line, only to learn that the only way to get the data was by mail, on a CD (compact disk). After a few weeks of waiting, the CD arrived and Delehanty dug out a computer that still had a CD-ROM drive. The data was in an old, rarely-seen format (a fixed-width delimited text file) without the necessary file that would automatically define the data columns. It took days to define the columns by hand, Delehanty said.

Sometimes, incompetent data management by the government means that information just doesn't exist. Edward Lawson, Jr., now a data analytics researcher for the state government of South Carolina, once tried to find out from the Defense Logistics Agency, part of the Department of Defense, how much military equipment was being sent to police departments around the country. He learned that prior to mid-2014, the agency had simply been updating each quarter's information in the same document, erasing and rewriting whatever inventory had been transferred the previous quarter.

"Before the later part of 2014, there were no records that existed," Lawson told Live Science.

Police department data should be accessible through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which allows citizens to request records from public agencies. But FOIA requests often come up empty, in many cases because police decide they simply do not want their department's data scrutinized. On Twitter, one data scientist who used to work on police use-of-force research wrote that some departments are forthcoming. Others ignore requests, deny them summarily or ask for enormous fees - such as a deposit of $1 million - to release records.

Some state laws make transparency more difficult. For example, Section 50-a in New York state seals personnel records for police officers, keeping complaints or histories of misconduct secret.

2. Demilitarize
Related: 13 Significant protests that changed the course of history
For decades, police departments have been gradually adopting more and more gear from the U.S. military. Departments get this gear in a variety of ways, but one common route is the 1033 program, which provides free surplus military gear to departments for the cost of shipping. Some of this gear is innocuous, Delahanty told Live Science - filing cabinets, gloves, binoculars and other run-of-the-mill supplies that departments would otherwise have to buy on their own. But departments have also received equipment such as grenade launchers, bayonets and mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles (MRAPS), which are military trucks designed to take blows from improvised explosive devices in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Both Delehanty and Lawson have found that police departments with more military equipment from the 1033 program kill more people. In a paper published in Political Research Quarterly in 2018, Lawson and his colleagues found that in all 50 states between 2014 and 2016, the number of police-involved deaths rose with militarization, as measured by the value of the equipment sent to a department via the 1033 program, even after controlling for factors such as population numbers, poverty, and violent crime. In 2017, Delehanty and colleagues reported in the journal Research & Politics that in four states where they had records (Connecticut, Maine, Nevada and New Hampshire), military equipment via the 1033 program was linked with more killings by police. In a given year, a department with no 1033 requisitions could expect 0.287 killings of suspects, on average, Delehanty found; those with the max expenditure could expect 0.656 killings, more than twice as many.

It's likely that departments with a militaristic, us-versus-them mindset seek out more military equipment, Lawson said. But Delehanty's findings hint that the cycle can feed on itself, with more military equipment encouraging a more violent force. By comparing departments over time, he and his colleagues found that the annual change in military equipment could predict a department's suspect deaths in the next year. A department with no new equipment in a year could expect 0.068 fewer suspect deaths in the following 365 days. A department with the most new requisitions could expect 0.188 more deaths. The researchers even found a similar increase in police killings of dogs, suggesting that cops weren't necessarily gearing up for big, casualty-heavy raids with their requisitions. They were simply becoming more violent in general.

The protests have led to renewed calls to end or restrict the 1033 program. In 2015, President Barack Obama put some limits on the program via executive order. President Donald Trump repealed that executive order in 2017. Now, Senator Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), has said he plans to introduce legislation to end the 1033 program entirely, The New York Times reported.

3. Change police culture

Training is often cited as a way to reduce racial biases among police officers and encourage de-escalation. Some training methods have evidence to back them up. For example, training in procedural justice, which focuses on fairness, was shown in one randomized experiment to reduce police officers' likelihood of ending encounters with arrests or using force, according to a 2018 study published in the journal Criminology & Public Policy. But training is a nebulous concept with little oversight, and departments don't necessarily turn to evidence-based programs. In 2017, for example, Fox 9 reported that the St. Paul Police Department's "main attraction" in its annual equity training was watching the children's movie "Zootopia." There are also questions about the efficacy of methods like implicit bias training, in part because of a lack of standards for these training methods and in part because the lessons may not translate to stressful circumstances, as The Atlantic reported in 2017.

There are regulatory ways to change police culture. A report by Sinyangwe released in 2016 for the Use of Force Project found that in departments that adopt more of eight policies that limit how police can use force the police kill fewer civilians. For the report, Sinyangwe looked at records from 94 of the nation's largest municipal police departments.

These policies include:

1. Requiring officers to de-escalate before using force;
2. Using guidelines defining the types of force that can be used to respond to specific situations;
3. Restricting or banning chokeholds and strangleholds;
4. Requiring a verbal warning before using deadly force;
5. Prohibiting officers from shooting at moving vehicles except in extreme circumstances;
6. Requiring officers to exhaust other options before resorting to deadly force;
7. Establishing a duty by officers to intervene if one of their colleagues is using excessive force;
8. Requiring officers to report all uses of force or attempted use of force.

Departments with four or more of these policies in place had 38% fewer police-involved killings per arrest than those with one or none, Sinyangwe found.

Police union contracts are also associated with police violence, mainly because contracts can be written to make it very difficult to fire or discipline officers for misconduct. A 2018 thesis by Oxford University graduate student Abdul Rad found that U.S. cities with more police protections had higher rates of police abuse, even when controlling for variables like racial demographics and crime rates.

In some cases, drastic measures are needed. After a major police-corruption scandal in 2010 and persistently high crime in Camden, New Jersey, the city decided to entirely disband its police department in 2013, starting a new department with an emphasis on community policing. This means policies are put in place to reduce the use of force and increase accountability, as well as to build trust between police and the community, according to .

4. Invest in alternatives

Community policing is an alternative to the "Broken Windows" style policing that cracks down hard on minor infractions, flooding neighborhoods with police enforcement.

"The idea was, after you flood these neighborhoods, you also flood them with social welfare programs," Lawson said. "We got the flood of police, but we never got the flood of social welfare, so we ended up having these kind of occupation zones where the police are acting like an occupying army."

Related: What's the difference between race and ethnicity?

Research shows that more comprehensive investments in communities pay dividends. A 2017 study published in the journal American Sociological Review found that across more than 250 cities, a greater number of nonprofit organizations was linked to declines in crime. For every 10 organizations in a city of 100,000 people, the murder rate dropped 9% and the violent crime rate went down 6%, the researchers reported. A similar study published in the journal Urban Affairs Review this year used Denver as an example and found that a higher density of nonprofits in an area was linked to lower crime, even after controlling for demographics and other factors.

Police are often the first to respond when someone with mental health issues is in crisis, and some evidence suggests that as many as 1 in 4 of those killed by police are mentally ill. , So some police departments have launched Crisis Intervention Teams (CITs), which consist of specially trained officers who work to get mentally ill individuals into treatment rather than escalating into a potentially violent encounter. The first of these programs, in Memphis, started in the late 1980s after police killed a mentally ill Black man who was cutting himself with a butcher knife. Research on CITs is challenging because different departments commit different levels of training and effort into their programs; but some evidence suggests that having a CIT in place results in less frequent use of SWAT (special weapons and tactics) teams, according to a 2008 review.

Some places have gone even further, taking police out of the mental-health response equation. In Eugene, Oregon, a 911 diversion program called CAHOOTS redirects calls about mental health-related issues to a team of mental health professionals and medics, rather than to police. Program staff also reach out to the city's homeless, giving out supplies and referring people to medical care, according to The Bend Bulletin.

5. Instill oversight

Independent and civilian oversight of police departments can go a long way toward reducing bad behavior. A 2015 study in the journal Police Quarterly found that departments that had citizen complaint investigations reviewed by an outside citizen agency were more likely to find that the complaints had merit, rather than dismissing them without consequence. (The study also found that Black complainants were more likely than those of other races to have their complaints dismissed.)

Federal investigations of police shootings can also reduce police killings, according to a 2017 investigation by. The news agency reviewed data on police shootings and found that Department of Justice intervention reduced police shootings by an average of 27% in the first year and up to 35% in subsequent years.

Another form of oversight involves citizen watchdogs. This aspect of policing the police has grown organically with the rise of video-enabled smartphones. Interestingly, research suggests that wearing body cams does not reduce police violence directly. But knowing that police officers could be wearing body cams but are choosing not to activate them might alter the public's opinion of police behavior, said Fabian Neuner, a political scientist at Arizona State University.

Meanwhile, having bystander video of police killing suspects appears to be altering the conversation on police racial bias and brutality. After the Michael Brown Jr. shooting in 2014, Neuner and his colleagues Hakeem Jefferson and Josh Pasek found a wide gap between Black people and White people in America as to whether the officer should have been charged and even over basic facts of the case. For example, 91% of Black Americans in the study thought the officer probably or definitely should have been charged, compared with 42% of White Americans. Meanwhile, 23% of White respondents thought Brown had a weapon, compared with 4.4% of Black respondents.

By contrast, the killing of George Floyd seems to have elicited a much more unified response. According to a YouGov poll, 78% of Americans believe the officer that killed Floyd should be charged.

"The debate is more about whether the charges even go far enough, so really the window of discussion has shifted," Neuner told Live Science.
Editor's note: This article has been updated to indicate the list is not a comprehensive one with all ideas for curbing police brutality. A correction was also made to indicate that a paper in Political Research Quarterly was published in 2018, not 2015 as was previously stated.
The reasons for the differences aren't entirely clear, but the video evidence of Floyd's death probably plays a role, Neuner said. The protests are likely having an impact, too.

"I'm sure that when it comes to the debates for this [election] cycle, that policy reform is going to be a big part of that," Neuner said. "I think it's really about driving that conversation."

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How to actually stop police brutality, according to science

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(Image credit: CHANDAN KHANNA/AFP via Getty Images) Cities across the U.S. have been rocked by nightly protests against police brutality following the May 25 killing of a Black Minneapolis man named George Floyd by a White police officer. And as videos proliferate of police arresting or tear gassing seemingly peaceful protestors, the issues raised by the protestors seem more insurmountable than ever.

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To help reduce fatal police encounters and increase public safety, Congress and all 50 states should pass police reform bills to provide the following interventions:

Improve use of force standards, including rules mandating when law enforcement officers can and cannot use deadly force

Collect and publish detailed data on officer arrests, use of force injuries and deaths, and racial bias data during police stops

Ensure independent and transparent investigations into all cases of excessive force and severe misconduct to ensure that officers are held accountable for their actions

License and track “wandering officers” to prevent agencies from hiring officers dismissed for misconduct by other agencies

Abolish qualified immunity, which often shields officers from liability for many constitutional violations, including fatal use of force.

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Police Brutality Statistics: What the Data Says About Police Violence in America

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The most vital police brutality statistics on deaths from police violence by examining the most authoritative, independent data sources.

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By becoming a member of NAACP, you'll join a network of activists standing up to injustice, fighting back against systemic racism, and answering the call for equality.

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The time is now. By becoming a member of NAACP, you'll join a network of activists standing up to injustice, fighting back against systemic racism, and answering the call for equality.

Thrive With Us

It's one thing to succeed as a community - it's another thing to thrive.

Take your advocacy one step further. As a member of the NAACP, you're making it your personal goal to ensure that our community thrives in every aspect including education, economics, health and wellbeing, and racial justice. Thriving in the NAACP looks like:

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Organizing marches, rallies, and direct action campaigns to bring attention to local issues

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Participating in voter registration and get-out-the-vote campaigns

Attending national events, regional conferences, and trainings to sharpen your advocacy and leadership skills

For any additional questions regarding membership, please contact our Membership Department at members@naacpnet.org, or call 866-636-2227.

For any additional questions regarding membership, please contact our Membership Department at members@naacpnet.org, or call 866-636-2227.

Your Membership Questions, Answered.

Looking to become a new member? Take a look at our frequently asked questions on how to join and how to get involved with your local unit.

What are the different levels/types of membership?

Annual Memberships

Adult (Ages 21 & older) - $30
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Prison Membership - $12.00

Lifetime Memberships

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Highlights that you are a member of the NAACP. It also has a Membership ID that gives you access to special perks and programs of the NAACP.

Gives you the opportunity to become part of your local NAACP office and a national network of people who:

Are activists who support education innovation, health equity, environmental and climate justice, inclusive economy, and racial equity

Organize marches, rallies, and direct-action campaigns to bring attention to local issues

Advocate for laws and policies to improve your community

Participate in voter registration and get-out-the-vote campaigns

Attend national events, regional conferences, and trainings to sharpen your advocacy and leadership skills, including the National Convention that is held every year and where you connect with leaders in social and civic justice and set the next year's agenda for issues facing our communities

Fully paid life members receive a commemorative NAACP plaque and pin.

How do I contact my local Unit?

Once you pay for your membership through the website, you are asked to post your zip code. In doing so, it identifies local units, and you can select one of your choices. Once that is complete, your membership is sent to the Unit and the Membership Chair will contact you.

Another way to find your local NAACP office is through a Google search. Visit your local NAACP's website and contact them through their contact us page. Or you can attend a general meeting and let them know you are interested in being a member and getting involved.

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You do not have to be a member to attend the National Convention. All are welcome, however, only member delegates can vote on matters important to the NAACP. Members are invited to the President's Reception and the Delegates Reception.

Thrive: In Movement. In Culture. In Community.

Furthering the Mission

At 110 years old, Pearl Bassett was the oldest living member of the NAACP. Ms. Pearl, as she was affectionately called, joined in 1930 after witnessing a lynching in her hometown of Marion, Indiana.

We tackle today's toughest challenges

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The Work of the NAACP is critical to improving our communities. I joined because, just as much as our community needs the NAACP, the association needs each of us to step up and share our time and talents to further the progress of civil rights and social justice.
- Joshua H., NAACP Baltimore Vice President

Thrive With Us

It's one thing to succeed as a community - it's another thing to thrive.

Take your advocacy one step further. As a member of the NAACP, you're making it your personal goal to ensure that our community thrives in every aspect including education, economics, health and wellbeing, and racial justice. Thriving in the NAACP looks like:

Providing scholarships for students, grants for Black entrepreneurs, and much-needed resources when disaster hits

Fueling local volunteers who drive culture and change in communities across the country

Amplifying the voice of Black America to make sure solutions to our most pressing issues are equitable

Working with activists and organizers in local NAACP branches

Organizing marches, rallies, and direct action campaigns to bring attention to local issues

Supporting access to quality education, healthcare, economic opportunities

Participating in voter registration and get-out-the-vote campaigns

Attending national events, regional conferences, and trainings to sharpen your advocacy and leadership skills

For any additional questions regarding membership, please contact our Membership Department at members@naacpnet.org, or call 866-636-2227.

Your Membership Questions, Answered.

Looking to become a new member? Take a look at our frequently asked questions on how to join and how to get involved with your local unit.

What are the different levels/types of membership?

Annual Memberships

Adult (Ages 21 & older) - $30
Youth (Ages 20 & under) - $10
WIN (Women In NAACP) Membership - $10 (only available to active members)
Prison Membership - $12.00

Lifetime Memberships

Junior Life (Ages 13 & under. Payable in annual installments of $25 or more) - Total $100
Bronze Life (Ages 14-20 Payable in annual installments of $50 or more) - Total $400
Silver Life (Payable in annual installments of $75 or more) - Total $750
Gold Life (Payable in annual installments of $150 or more) - Total $1,500   Only available to Fully Paid Silver Members
Diamond Life (Payable in installments of $250 or more) - Total amount $2,500  (Only available to Fully paid Gold Members)

*Corporate Membership

$5000

What do I get as an NAACP member?

Your NAACP membership:

Highlights that you are a member of the NAACP. It also has a Membership ID that gives you access to special perks and programs of the NAACP.

Gives you the opportunity to become part of your local NAACP office and a national network of people who:

Are activists who support education innovation, health equity, environmental and climate justice, inclusive economy, and racial equity

Organize marches, rallies, and direct-action campaigns to bring attention to local issues

Advocate for laws and policies to improve your community

Participate in voter registration and get-out-the-vote campaigns

Attend national events, regional conferences, and trainings to sharpen your advocacy and leadership skills, including the National Convention that is held every year and where you connect with leaders in social and civic justice and set the next year's agenda for issues facing our communities

Fully paid life members receive a commemorative NAACP plaque and pin.

How do I contact my local Unit?

Once you pay for your membership through the website, you are asked to post your zip code. In doing so, it identifies local units, and you can select one of your choices. Once that is complete, your membership is sent to the Unit and the Membership Chair will contact you.

Another way to find your local NAACP office is through a Google search. Visit your local NAACP's website and contact them through their contact us page. Or you can attend a general meeting and let them know you are interested in being a member and getting involved.

If you are still unable to connect with the unit in your area, please contact NAACP Membership Services,  members@naacpnet.org  or call (866-636-2227).

What goes on at the National Convention?

The purpose of the annual convention is to establish policies and programs of action for the ensuing year. Visit our website:   naacp.org/convention

You do not have to be a member to attend the National Convention. All are welcome, however, only member delegates can vote on matters important to the NAACP. Members are invited to the President's Reception and the Delegates Reception.

Thrive: In Movement. In Culture. In Community.

Furthering the Mission

At 110 years old, Pearl Bassett was the oldest living member of the NAACP. Ms. Pearl, as she was affectionately called, joined in 1930 after witnessing a lynching in her hometown of Marion, Indiana.

We tackle today's toughest challenges

Pause

30% likelihood of a Black person to be stopped without just cause than a white person

65% of Black adults have felt targeted because of their race

10X more income made by White families than Black families

80% higher mortgage denial rate for Blacks applicants than white applicants

32% of Black students lived in poverty in 2018

45% of Black students attended high-poverty schools in fall 2017

34% of COVID-19 deaths were among non-Hispanic Black people

3x Black women are three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes

68% of Black Americans live or have lived within 30 miles of a coal-fired power plant over the past several decades

60% of Black Americans live in communities with uncontrolled toxic waste sites

675k calls made by NAACP volunteers to Black voters in 2020

10 battleground states reached during 2020 election year

300k young people have participated in the NAACP ACT-SO Achievement Program

40+ years producing top Black talent through ACT-SO

The Work of the NAACP is critical to improving our communities. I joined because, just as much as our community needs the NAACP, the association needs each of us to step up and share our time and talents to further the progress of civil rights and social justice.
- Joshua H., NAACP Baltimore Vice President

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By becoming a member of NAACP, you'll be standing up to injustice, fighting back against systemic racism, and answering the call for equality.

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No More Police: A Case for Abolition by Mariame Kaba and Andrea J. Ritchie offers a timely reintroduction to the abolition movement, harnessing its passion into actionable steps that empower us to pick up the mantle of creating a future that serves our communities.

“the bridge to the future we want lies in where we invest resources now, not in continuing to shackle our imaginations to the violence of policing or the failed idea that we can somehow contain it.”

While the media and bandwagon politicians may have moved on from “defund the police”—in no small part aided by the “copaganda” Kaba and Ritchie describe in their Guardian interview—No More Police outlines a pathway back to and beyond this slogan. It is simultaneously a call to action and to compassion, and a road map on how to get there. As the United States continues to be a leader in law enforcement violence, with incidents of police brutality making national headlines multiple times a week, No More Police and its accompanying Reading and Discussion Guide show activists how to turn what conservatives and liberals alike consider an impossibility into our reality.

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The Black Lives Matter movement, reinvigorated during the summer 2020 uprisings, galvanized hundreds of thousands of people into the streets and ushered the slogan "defund the police" into wide circulation. But over the past two years, as targeted communities and abolitionist organizers have proposed radical, imaginative alternatives to the violence of policing, "defund" has been shouted down in many places, in favor of minimal efforts toward police reform. This year, the NYPD budget alone is set to increase by $90 million while 77 percent of NYC public schools face budget cuts. Clearly, the conversation on where and why we direct public funds is as relevant as ever.

No More Police: A Case for Abolition by Mariame Kaba and Andrea J. Ritchie offers a timely reintroduction to the abolition movement, harnessing its passion into actionable steps that empower us to pick up the mantle of creating a future that serves our communities.

"Unpack the Notion of Safety Itself"

Among the first steps is "Reclaiming Safety," as excerpted in . With a brilliant mix of compassion and logic, Kaba and Ritchie challenge readers to extricate their own definition of safety from the state's current police-dependent one. As they write, "the state's carceral safety robs our communities of the conditions and nutrients that would allow true safety to grow, forcing us into the position of constantly reaching for more security from the very institutions that make us collectively less safe." To reject the paradox of state-defined safety, they encourage readers to think about when they themselves feel safe, what contributes to this feeling, and what institutional and personal factors can further nurture this feeling. These are the factors that we as a society should be investing in, taking "money away from death and [putting] it toward life," as Ritchie said in an interview with The Guardian.

Acknowledge Reformism As the Problem, Not the Solution

But shouldn't we attempt to reform the system to better serve us now, while continuing our pursuit of abolition as a long-term goal? This commonly asked question came up on The Takeaway's episode Deep Dive: Police Abolition, on which Andrea J. Ritchie was featured as an "abolitionist teacher." Other guests argued for the importance of shoring up the police force with further training and better pay as a final or interim solution. But these solutions, and in fact the question itself, convey an inability to imagine a world without police. Taking to Twitter to respond to other guests, Ritchie states that "the bridge to the future we want lies in where we invest resources now, not in continuing to shackle our imaginations to the violence of policing or the failed idea that we can somehow contain it." She and Kaba argue in "Why We Don't Say 'Reform the Police,'" an excerpt published in , that policing in the United States, with its violent and racist origins, is unreformable. From the 1994 Crime Bill to Obama's 2014 Task Force on 21st Century Policing, the funds that poured into reforming the police have historically had extremely limited impact on policing. The issue is not a lack of resources, it is assuming that an antiquated system built to oppress a portion of the population is of use.

Create Attitudes of Abundance

This post was written by Maya Petrillo-Fernandez, a Fall 2022 New Press intern.

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Three Steps Toward Police Abolition | The New Press

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The Black Lives Matter movement, reinvigorated during the summer 2020 uprisings, galvanized hundreds of thousands of people into the streets and ushered the slogan "defund the police" into wide circulation. But over the past two years, as targeted communities and abolitionist organizers have proposed radical, imaginative alternatives to the violence of policing, "defund" has been shouted down in many places, in favor of minimal efforts toward police reform.

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The Louisville, Kentucky, police force routinely discriminates against Black residents, uses excessive force and conducts illegal searches, the U.S. Justice Department

officers shot Taylor dead after bursting into her apartment on a no-knock warrant, as well as the Louisville-Jefferson County government.

The investigation found the police department used aggressive tactics selectively against Black people, who comprise roughly one in four Louisville residents, as well as other vulnerable people, such as those with behavioral health challenges.

Some Louisville police officers even filmed themselves insulting people with disabilities and describing Black people as "monkeys," the Justice Department said. It also found that officers quickly resorted to violence.

Taylor, a 26-year-old emergency medical technician, was asleep in bed with her boyfriend on March 13, 2020, when Louisville police executing a no-knock warrant burst into her apartment.

Her boyfriend fired at them believing they were intruders and police returned fire, fatally shooting Taylor.

The killings of both Taylor and Floyd prompted the Justice Department in 2021 to open civil rights investigations, known as "pattern or practice" probes, into the police departments in Louisville and Minneapolis to determine if they engaged in systemic abuses. The results of the Minneapolis review have not yet been released.

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Louisville police discriminate against Black people, US Justice Dept says

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The Louisville, Kentucky, police force routinely discriminates against Black residents, uses excessive force and conducts illegal searches, the U.S. Justice Department said on Wednesday, following a probe prompted by Breonna Taylor’s killing in 2020.

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The History of Police Brutality, and What it Means for You

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The History of Police Brutality, and What it Means for You

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While Caucasians represent about 63 percent of the United States population, blacks make up about 14 percent of the United States population. Nonetheless, in some years, blacks have accounted for more than a quarter of victims of police shootings despite the lower percentage of the total population they represent.

Racial stereotypes are only part of the problem that leads to police brutality. Other factors include rampant discrimination and disparate treatment of certain minorities in the judicial system also lead to the misinformed belief that certain minorities are more likely to engage in criminal activity than others.

Police brutality has historically been perpetrated against individuals in lower socioeconomic levels and the social marginalized, commencing with worker strikes in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Police brutality was permitted against citizens who challenged big industries. Police brutality was used to oppress labor strikes. Also, police would brutalize working-class people and arrest them without cause. Police brutality was also a common occurrence during the civil rights era when activists would be sprayed down with water hoses and attacked by police dogs.

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The History of Police Brutality, and What it Means for You - HG.org

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The United States has a sordid history involving racial relations. Some of this history has been manifested in notable cases regarding police brutality. Given the dire historical context, police bruta

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The origins of modern-day policing can be traced back to the "Slave Patrol." The earliest formal slave patrol was created in the Carolinas in the early 1700s with one mission: to establish a system of terror and squash slave uprisings with the capacity to pursue, apprehend, and return runaway slaves to their owners. Tactics included the use of excessive force to control and produce desired slave behavior.

"I [patroller's name], do swear, that I will as searcher for guns, swords, and other weapons among the slaves in my district, faithfully, and as privately as I can, discharge the trust reposed in me as the law directs, to the best of my power. So help me, God."

North Carolina Slave Patrol Oath

The criminal justice system is heavily impacted by the bias of police mentality and outdated judicial precedents. The system is largely driven by racial disparities and the Black community continues to be a target. The results are brutal and long lasting.

"All cruelty begins with dehumanization — not seeing the face of the other, not seeing the whole humanity of the other. A cultural regime of dehumanization has been constructed in many police departments. In that fertile ground, racial biases can spread and become entrenched."

The Atlantic, (June 16, 2020),The Culture of Policing is Broken

Additionally, the rate of fatal police shootings among Black Americans was much higher than that for any other ethnicity, standing at 35 fatal shootings per million of the population as of March 2021.

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Learn about the history of modern day policing in the U.S., home to the world’s largest prison population and highest per-capita incarceration rate.

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The History of Policing in the US and Its Impact on Americans Today

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The History of Policing in the US and Its Impact on Americans Today

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The history of policing can be traced back to the days of slavery in colonial America. In the South, where slavery was central to the economy, slave patrols, responsible for capturing runaway slaves and returning them to their masters, was the first unofficial police in America. slave patrols were especially cruel in the ways they captured runaway slaves and punished them for their daring escapes. Slave rebellions were a constant threat to the economic status quo of the southern plantation owners, and slave patrols ensured that these owners were able to intimidate and punish any insurgencies or revolts. In return, these wealthy plantation owners protected the interests of the slave catchers.  this practice created a social hierarchy between the wealthy landowners at the top, the slave patrols separating the wealthy from the poor, and the slaves who were at the bottom of this hierarchy.

These slave patrols slowly morphed into policing units in charge of breaking up insurgencies that began to rise in the aftermath of the Civil War. After the civil war Southerners, felt threatened by the population of freed African Americans, arguing that they would disrupt the social order. As a result, African American communities experienced an increase in violence committed against them in the form of police brutality.

The Reconstruction Era, which came immediately after the Civil War. During the Reconstruction Era, cruelty was the policing style, and protecting the economic interests of the wealthy proved very beneficial to these units. Police were used as a way to provide a sense of security for the white communities, keeping the black communities intimidated and segregated from the white population.

Known as the Jim Crow laws, a number of legislations were passed in an attempt to keep the black and white communities segregated, and racist policies were put in place to target and imprison people of color. policing centered around rounding up and arresting African Americans for violating the racist Jim Crow Laws, denying them their fundamental rights as human beings. Racism was still rampant in the South and was especially tolerated under the prison system. Ironically, the loophole provided by the thirteenth amendment gave rise to today’s prison industrial complex.

These racist policies were further encouraged by the passing of the “separate but equal” verdict by the Supreme Court in the Plessy v. Ferguson case, and they continued to target African Americans for simply existing.The verdict only emboldened and encouraged policing to incorporate racism into lawful practice. Unfortunately, this legal segregation lasted almost a hundred years, until the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964.

As the Civil Rights Movement took place, inspiring hundreds of people to come together to demand justice, police were on the frontline of the opposing end, protecting the economic interests of America at the expense of human beings.  The police would also brutally beat up and bruise the peaceful protesters, while others were incarcerated for daring to protest for their civil rights.

Policing since then has evolved to incorporate discriminatory practices, such as the “stop and frisk” policy – which empowers police to stop and search someone without a warrant if they have a reason to believe that individuals are doing something wrong – or the practice of racial profiling individuals to “fit” the description of a suspect the police can then target.Today, the discrimination that is present in policies like stop and frisk, and racial profiling; and the war on drugs upholds the social hierarchy created during the times of slavery.

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The History of Policing in the US and Its Impact on Americans Today – UAB Institute for Human Rights Blog

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Policing in America has a long history, one that dates back to the founding of this country. Although it has always been a controversial issue, the recent instances of police brutality that have come to light along with the increasing momentum behind the Black Lives Matter movement have forced it ba…

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"The duration and type of training varies widely worldwide. Recruits in the United States spend significantly less time in police academies than those in most European countries. Basic U.S. training programs take twenty-one weeks on average, whereas similar European programs can last more than three years [PDF]."

"academies on average spent the most time—seventy-one hours—on firearm skills, compared with twenty-one hours on de-escalation training (which teaches how to use conversation and other tactics to calm a situation without using force) and crisis-intervention strategies. In Germany, firearms training focuses on how to avoid using force. Japanese officers are trained to use martial arts."

"The United States far surpasses most wealthy democracies in killings by police. Campaign Zero's Mapping Police Violence tracker estimates that U.S. police killed 8,767 people between 2013 and 2020. (According to the same database, they killed another 1,139 people in 2021.) In comparison, at least 254 people died in encounters with Canadian police between 2013 and 2020. Some countries, such as Finland and Norway, have gone years without police killings."

"Worldwide, police often have tense relationships with minority communities. U.S. policing has a long history of discrimination. Black Americans are 20 percent more likely to have their vehicles pulled over than white Americans and about three times more likely to be killed by police."

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Introduction

The murder of George Floyd, a Black man, by a white police officer in the United States sparked a national reckoning with police brutality and systemic racism in 2020. Protesters' calls to defund the police, ban the use of choke holds, and end practices that target minority communities prompted a public policy debate over police reform and an examination of how other countries approach policing. The trial of Derek Chauvin, the former officer convicted of Floyd's murder, and further police violence-including the recent killings of Daunte Wright, a Black man, and Adam Toledo, a Latinx child, by white officers-have refocused attention on the issue.

The U.S. approach to policing differs from those of other advanced democracies, in areas including organization, funding, training, relations with minority communities, use of force, and accountability.

Do democracies organize police differently?

Yes, and the number of police forces in the United States far surpasses those in other advanced democracies. Police systems in many countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) are more centralized than the U.S. system. Some countries, such as Sweden, have a single national force organized and overseen by the federal government.

Others have a few national forces with differing responsibilities. France, for example, has a national force with jurisdiction over cities and another national force that focuses on rural areas, in addition to municipal police. Still others, such as England and Wales, have regional forces that enjoy some autonomy but must comply with central government standards, including on training and investigating misconduct.

The United States has about eighteen thousand law enforcement agencies, including local, state, and federal police forces. Canada, which administers police at the municipal, provincial, and federal levels, has fewer than two hundred police services, which themselves have hundreds of detachments.

Many experts argue that standardizing training, oversight, and disciplinary procedures through a central authority, such as a state's attorney general, could help to address issues in U.S. policing. "Centralized administration of policing makes it possible to set and enforce uniform standards throughout the police force," says Paul Hirschfield, a sociology professor at Rutgers University who has studied policing in Europe, where most forces are centralized.

A recent wave of legislation at the state level has helped standardize U.S. policing. However, centralization can be a challenging process. In one effort, the Netherlands consolidated its twenty-five police divisions into a national police force, but tensions remained between local and national officials. The government later admitted that the reform was too ambitious, though it continues today.

How do countries fund their police?

Spending on law enforcement varies among similarly wealthy OECD members. At the low end, Finland spends less than 0.5 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP), while Hungary spends the most, at roughly 1.4 percent.

The United States spends close to 1 percent of its GDP on police. Local governments fund most of this, though state and federal governments finance their own law enforcement agencies. Activists and lawmakers have recently called to "defund" U.S. law enforcement agencies. To many people, this means diverting police funds to other services, including education, housing, mental health care, and community-led safety initiatives.

A January 2021 analysis of the fifty largest U.S. cities found that, despite public pressure, more than half increased their spending on police for the 2021 fiscal year. During the November 2020 elections, no jurisdictions had ballot initiatives to directly reduce police funding. Still, voters in Los Angeles County, California, approved a measure that requires the county to spend 10 percent of its general fund budget on alternatives to incarceration, such as youth outreach programs and mental health care.

U.S. municipalities and states can receive financial and material support from the federal government. For example, the Department of Defense transfers excess military equipment to police, which has raised concerns that American police have become overly militarized. In the wake of protests over Floyd's murder, the legislation that authorized the Pentagon's spending for fiscal year 2021 prohibited transfers of certain equipment, including weaponized drones. Canada's military also supplies police with equipment.

In Mexico, as in the United States, states and cities fund police forces to supplement federal law enforcement. Critics say the result is that wealthier areas have better trained and equipped forces. Australian and Western European cities generally don't fund their own police forces. One exception is Switzerland, where many municipalities finance local departments to augment regional forces.

U.S. policing has also drawn controversy over excessive fines, fees, and asset forfeiture, a widespread practice in which departments profit from seizing the assets of citizens, many of whom are never charged with a crime. Law enforcement agencies elsewhere, including in much of Canada and the United Kingdom, also profit from asset confiscation. In some countries where corruption is rampant, officers collect bribes. To combat this problem, the country of Georgia fired and rebuilt most of its police force following the country's 2003 revolution, though it has since experienced backsliding.

What are police responsible for?

Police perform many duties, sometimes in situations they aren't trained for. In the United States, not only do local officers patrol communities, investigate crimes, make arrests, and issue traffic citations, they also respond to mental health crises, domestic disputes, and noise complaints. Some experts argue that this broad mandate can lead to unnecessary escalation and use of force. Researchers estimate that one in ten police calls in the United States is related to mental health. Approximately one in four people shot and killed by police between 2015 and 2020 showed signs of mental illness.

Some countries, as well as several U.S. cities, have sought to address this by creating specialized units to respond to mental health emergencies. In Stockholm, some responders drive a mental health ambulance. Through a similar program known as CAHOOTS in the Oregon cities of Eugene and Springfield, unarmed medics and crisis workers respond to 911 calls relating to individuals experiencing psychological crises, an approach other cities are trying to replicate. In 2019, CAHOOTS responded to twenty-four thousand calls, about 20 percent of total 911 dispatches. Other countries rely on unarmed professionals to respond to low-level crimes. In England and Wales, community support officers can fine someone who litters or confiscate alcohol from a minor, but they must ask police officers to make arrests. Experts say these and similar programs have reduced incidents of police violence.

"Just look at what police are doing right now and ask, 'In which of these situations do I need an armed first responder?' If we don't need an armed first responder, why are police doing it in the first place?" says Tracey L. Meares, professor at Yale Law School and founding director of the school's Justice Collaboratory.

What training do police undergo?

The duration and type of training varies widely worldwide. Recruits in the United States spend significantly less time in police academies than those in most European countries. Basic U.S. training programs take twenty-one weeks on average, whereas similar European programs can last more than three years [PDF]. In Finland and Norway, recruits study policing in national colleges, spending part of the time in an internship with local police, and earn degrees in criminal justice or related fields. In the United States, police officers must have at least a high school education or its equivalent, though some states require additional qualifications.

With hundreds of police academies, the United States lacks national standards for what recruits should learn. U.S. academies tend to emphasize technical skills rather than communication and restraint. According to a 2013 U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics report [PDF], academies on average spent the most time-seventy-one hours-on firearm skills, compared with twenty-one hours on de-escalation training (which teaches how to use conversation and other tactics to calm a situation without using force) and crisis-intervention strategies. In Germany, firearms training focuses on how to avoid using force. Japanese officers are trained to use martial arts.

Is police violence against civilians widespread?

Police brutality remains a problem in many advanced democracies. Officers worldwide have used aggressive means, such as rubber bullets and tear gas, to crack down on protesters, including French police during the Yellow Vests protests that began in late 2018. In October 2020, Nigerian security forces reportedly opened fire on protesters calling for police reform, killing twelve people. Police have also used deadly force when enforcing pandemic restrictions, including in Kenya.

The United States far surpasses most wealthy democracies in killings by police. Campaign Zero's Mapping Police Violence tracker estimates that U.S. police killed 8,767 people between 2013 and 2020. (According to the same database, they killed another 1,139 people in 2021.) In comparison, at least 254 people died in encounters with Canadian police between 2013 and 2020. Some countries, such as Finland and Norway, have gone years without police killings.

The UN Code of Conduct for Law Enforcement Officials [PDF], adopted by the General Assembly in 1979, says officers should only use force as a last resort. U.S. police can legally use deadly force if they reasonably believe they or other people are in danger, but some critics have questioned whether officers can make this judgment call. Canadian law has a similar provision. In contrast, the European Convention on Human Rights [PDF], which has been ratified by forty-seven countries, permits force only when "absolutely necessary," and individual countries more strictly regulate its use. For instance, police in most of Europe are barred from using many neck restraints, the controversial tactic that resulted in Floyd's death.

In the United States, police are armed, increasingly with military-grade equipment. By contrast, more than a dozen other democracies generally do not arm their police with guns and may instead rely on firearm-equipped teams that can respond to high-risk situations. In Ireland, most police are not even trained to use firearms. UK police, who are usually unarmed, have themselves resisted calls for them to bear arms, in line with their philosophy of policing by consent, which maintains that police legitimacy is contingent on public approval of their actions. New Zealand's typically unarmed police also follow this approach.

U.S. police departments often point to the country's high rate of civilian gun ownership-more than 120 weapons for every 100 residents-to justify arming themselves. Seventy-three U.S. police officers were gunned down in 2021. During that same year, officers shot and killed roughly sixteen times more civilians. All countries where police aren't armed more tightly regulate civilian gun ownership than the United States does. In Iceland, where gun ownership is common, there has only been one documented case of a civilian killed by police in the country's history.

How common are strained police-minority relations?

Worldwide, police often have tense relationships with minority communities. U.S. policing has a long history of discrimination. Black Americans are 20 percent more likely to have their vehicles pulled over than white Americans and about three times more likely to be killed by police. Discriminatory policing contributes to high rates of incarceration among minorities, oftentimes resulting in disenfranchisement, recidivism, and generational poverty.

Racial, religious, and other minorities are also stopped more often by police in much of Europe, despite generally lower crime rates among these groups. France has long struggled with rampant police targeting and abuse of Black and Arab people, which has at times sparked mass protests. Human rights activists have accused police in several OECD countries-including Greece, Italy, and North Macedonia-of arbitrarily detaining, torturing, or otherwise abusing refugees and migrants. Frequent deaths of indigenous Australians in police custody and prison have fueled outrage for decades.

New data-driven policing tools, which use technology to surveil the public and predict crime, could exacerbate racialized policing in Europe and the United States, according to anti-racism researchers. Facial recognition tools are less able to accurately distinguish between people of color, and U.S. police forces have faced allegations of perpetuating racism through data-driven profiling.

Discrimination has dampened public confidence in law enforcement. In the United States, trust in police varies by race, with Black Americans less trusting of police than others. Europeans typically trust police more than legal or political systems, though confidence in police is lower among certain minority groups than the general public. LGBTQ+ people are often wary of police. India's Muslim communities share a distrust of police, who have been accused in recent years of failing to stop violent anti-Muslim mobs.

How have countries sought to improve police-minority relations?

Some countries have moved to diversify their forces. Some U.S. law enforcement experts say police diversity increases innovation, minimizes biases, and improves community relations. Northern Ireland, scarred by decades of conflict between the Catholic minority and Protestant majority, implemented a policy that the two groups each comprise half of its police recruits. This led to widespread trust in police by both groups, experts say, though there are still fewer Catholic officers.

Research on U.S. police has found that hiring more Black officers doesn't necessarily reduce fatal encounters with Black civilians. Similarly, in postapartheid South Africa, which has a national police force, the government has pushed to employ more Black officers, especially in leadership positions; yet poor Black communities still suffer disproportionately from police violence.

Departments worldwide have also implemented community policing techniques to ease tensions. This includes deploying community liaisons, which in Australia work alongside officers to reduce crime and foster cross-cultural understanding and communication between police and minority groups. In Richmond, California, community policing efforts slashed crime rates and increased trust in police. Broadly, however, community policing tactics have had mixed results.

What does police accountability look like?

UN guidelines state that any effective police accountability system [PDF] must increase civilian control over the police, investigate cases of misconduct and act swiftly to address them, and reduce corruption.

Many countries rely on independent oversight bodies that have nationwide jurisdiction. In Denmark, an independent watchdog reviews all misconduct complaints and alleged criminal offenses by police. In England and Wales, police forces are legally required to refer serious misconduct cases, including any killing by an officer, to an independent watchdog. That agency also sets standards for how local departments should handle complaints, though fair-policing advocates have questioned its efficacy.

U.S. law primarily allows police departments to investigate themselves, though there are exceptions. Some states, such as New Jersey, require local departments to turn over investigations into officer-involved shootings to county or state authorities. Cities and municipalities also have their own oversight practices; during the November 2020 elections, voters in more than a dozen cities and counties approved initiatives to strengthen oversight, including by creating new bodies to review complaints or expanding the powers of existing ones. The Department of Justice (DOJ) can pressure departments to address systemic issues using consent decrees, or court-approved agreements between the DOJ and local law enforcement agencies. The DOJ signed fourteen consent decrees during the Barack Obama administration; the Donald Trump administration restricted their use, but the Joe Biden administration rescinded its predecessor's limits on consent decrees in April 2021.

Many complainants of police abuse or misconduct never see an investigation or punishment for the officer involved. Canadian officers involved in fatal interactions are rarely charged, according to one study of such incidents between 2000 and 2017. Likewise, U.S. officers rarely face legal consequences for shooting and killing civilians; Chauvin's convictions of murder and manslaughter for Floyd's killing were exceptions. Police are also often shielded from lawsuits through a controversial doctrine known as qualified immunity. New York City recently moved to curtail this privilege for its police force, which is the country's largest, and residents of King County, Washington, voted last year to require an investigation of whether an officer's conduct caused an individual's death.

One strategy to prevent convicted officers from returning to the field is a national database that tracks officers' terminations and criminal convictions. In March 2021, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a sweeping bill named after Floyd to reduce racism in policing and to hold officers accountable, including by making it easier to prosecute them and by creating federally maintained databases to track police use of force and misconduct. However, the bill-which the Biden administration has called its " top priority" for police reform-failed to pass the Senate in 2021, leading Biden to promise executive action to revive the issue.

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What Are Police Like in Other Countries?

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The murder of George Floyd, a Black man, by a white police officer in the United States sparked a national reckoning with police brutality and systemic racism in 2020. Protesters' calls to defund the police, ban the use of choke holds, and end practices that target minority communities prompted a public policy debate over police reform and an examination of how other countries approach policing.

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"White men initially created police departments to control enslaved people and Native Americans, and violence has been a part of American police forces since their inception."

"According to a 2016 Department of Justice survey, at least 12,200 local law enforcement agencies and 3,000 sheriff’s offices operate independently with minimal oversight. About 90% of those agencies employ fewer than 50 officers. And nearly 50% of local departments have fewer than ten officers."

That fragmentation makes it nearly impossible to mandate consistent standards in police training, data collection, use of force policies, and accountability for officers who repeatedly use excessive force. As a result, police officers in the United States are often poorly trained to practice de-escalation in stressful situations.

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Police Brutality Statistics: What the Data Says About Police Violence in America

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The most vital police brutality statistics on deaths from police violence by examining the most authoritative, independent data sources.

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"about 1,000 people in the U.S. population are killed by police every year. "

"American police kill civilians at extraordinarily higher rates than police in other high-income democracies. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, a criminal justice think tank, in 2019, U.S. police killed 3.35 per 1 million people. Canadian police, the next highest on the list, killed 0.98 for every 1 million. And police in England and Wales rarely kill civilians, at a rate of .05 per 1 million.In other words, police in the U.S. kill people at a rate at least three times higher than Canadian police do and at least 60 times the rate of police in England and Wales. And according to an analysis by The Guardian, U.S. police killed more people in the first 24 days of 2015 than cops in England and Wales did throughout the previous 24 years."

"

Police killed white people at a rate of 15 per 1 million

Police killed Hispanic people at a rate of 28 per 1 million

Police killed Black people at a rate of 38 per 1 million

In other words, Hispanic Americans were nearly two times as likely to be killed by the police than white Americans, and Black Americans were more than 2.5 times as likely to be killed by the police than white people."

"Black Americans were not only more likely to be killed by police than other races. They were also more likely to be unarmed and less likely to be threatening someone when killed."

"Based on Professor Stinson’s data on police crimes — only a tiny minority, less than 2% of officers who killed civilians in the line of duty, were charged with a crime. The vast majority of officers who killed people while on duty, 98.2%, were not charged with a crime."

"it’s rare for DAs to charge officers who kill. And according to Stinson’s police crimes data, of the 155 officers prosecuted for murder or manslaughter since 2005, only about one-third resulted in a criminal conviction. One-third were acquitted in court, and another one-third of cases are still pending."

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Police Brutality Statistics: What the Data Says About Police Violence in America

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The most vital police brutality statistics on deaths from police violence by examining the most authoritative, independent data sources.

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"What began in spring 2020 as local protests in response to the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police quickly exploded into a massive nationwide movement. Millions of mostly young people defiantly flooded into the nation’s streets, demanding an end to police brutality and to the broader, systemic repression of Black people and other people of color. "

"rebellions will surely continue unless police are no longer called on to manage the consequences of dismal conditions beyond their control, and until an oppressive system is finally remade on the principles of justice and equality."

"Black rebellion, America on Fire powerfully illustrates, was born in response to poverty and exclusion, but most immediately in reaction to police violence. In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson launched the “War on Crime,” sending militarized police forces into impoverished Black neighborhoods. Facing increasing surveillance and brutality, residents threw rocks and Molotov cocktails at officers, plundered local businesses, and vandalized exploitative institutions."

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What began in spring 2020 as local protests in response to the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police quickly exploded into a massive nationwide movement. Millions of mostly young people defiantly flooded into the nation's streets, demanding an end to police brutality and to the broader, systemic repression of Black people and other people of color. To many observers, the protests appeared to be without precedent in their scale and persistence. Yet, as the acclaimed historian Elizabeth Hinton demonstrates in America on Fire, the events of 2020 had clear precursors-and any attempt to understand our current crisis requires a reckoning with the recent past.

Even in the aftermath of Donald Trump, many Americans consider the decades since the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s as a story of progress toward greater inclusiveness and equality. Hinton's sweeping narrative uncovers an altogether different history, taking us on a troubling journey from Detroit in 1967 and Miami in 1980 to Los Angeles in 1992 and beyond to chart the persistence of structural racism and one of its primary consequences, the so-called urban riot. Hinton offers a critical corrective: the word riot was nothing less than a racist trope applied to events that can only be properly understood as rebellions-explosions of collective resistance to an unequal and violent order. As she suggests, if rebellion and the conditions that precipitated it never disappeared, the optimistic story of a post-Jim Crow United States no longer holds.

Black rebellion, America on Fire powerfully illustrates, was born in response to poverty and exclusion, but most immediately in reaction to police violence. In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson launched the "War on Crime," sending militarized police forces into impoverished Black neighborhoods. Facing increasing surveillance and brutality, residents threw rocks and Molotov cocktails at officers, plundered local businesses, and vandalized exploitative institutions. Hinton draws on exclusive sources to uncover a previously hidden geography of violence in smaller American cities, from York, Pennsylvania, to Cairo, Illinois, to Stockton, California.

The central lesson from these eruptions-that police violence invariably leads to community violence-continues to escape policymakers, who respond by further criminalizing entire groups instead of addressing underlying socioeconomic causes. The results are the hugely expanded policing and prison regimes that shape the lives of so many Americans today. Presenting a new framework for understanding our nation's enduring strife, America on Fire is also a warning: rebellions will surely continue unless police are no longer called on to manage the consequences of dismal conditions beyond their control, and until an oppressive system is finally remade on the principles of justice and equality.

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America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s

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What began in spring 2020 as local protests in response to the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police quickly exploded into a massive nationwide movement. Millions of mostly young people defiantly flooded into the nation's streets, demanding an end to police brutality and to the broader, systemic repression of Black people and other people of color.