Police Brutality In the United States by Soniya Tomer https://padlet.com/sotomer2/wud7ugz6behqld5m en-us 2023-06-09 08:42:57 UTC 2023-06-16 12:08:20 UTC hello@padlet.com America On Fire sotomer2 https://padlet.com/sotomer2/wud7ugz6behqld5m/wish/2620314004 "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." ]]> 2023-06-11 18:00:10 UTC https://padlet.com/sotomer2/wud7ugz6behqld5m/wish/2620314004 Police Brutality Statistics sotomer2 https://padlet.com/sotomer2/wud7ugz6behqld5m/wish/2620321065 "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. 

]]> 2023-06-11 18:20:54 UTC https://padlet.com/sotomer2/wud7ugz6behqld5m/wish/2620321065 sotomer2 https://padlet.com/sotomer2/wud7ugz6behqld5m/wish/2620324327 "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."]]> 2023-06-11 18:30:21 UTC https://padlet.com/sotomer2/wud7ugz6behqld5m/wish/2620324327 The History of Policing in the US and Its Impact on Americans Today sotomer2 https://padlet.com/sotomer2/wud7ugz6behqld5m/wish/2620338029 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. 






]]> 2023-06-11 19:12:12 UTC https://padlet.com/sotomer2/wud7ugz6behqld5m/wish/2620338029 THE ORIGINS OF MODERN DAY POLICING sotomer2 https://padlet.com/sotomer2/wud7ugz6behqld5m/wish/2620354043 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.
]]> 2023-06-11 19:59:26 UTC https://padlet.com/sotomer2/wud7ugz6behqld5m/wish/2620354043 The History of Police Brutality, and What it Means for You sotomer2 https://padlet.com/sotomer2/wud7ugz6behqld5m/wish/2620357446  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.


]]> 2023-06-11 20:08:38 UTC https://padlet.com/sotomer2/wud7ugz6behqld5m/wish/2620357446 Police Brutality Statistics sotomer2 https://padlet.com/sotomer2/wud7ugz6behqld5m/wish/2620357591 "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."






]]> 2023-06-11 20:09:10 UTC https://padlet.com/sotomer2/wud7ugz6behqld5m/wish/2620357591 sotomer2 https://padlet.com/sotomer2/wud7ugz6behqld5m/wish/2622252852  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.

]]> 2023-06-13 12:36:45 UTC https://padlet.com/sotomer2/wud7ugz6behqld5m/wish/2622252852 Three steps toward police abolition sotomer2 https://padlet.com/sotomer2/wud7ugz6behqld5m/wish/2622611177 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.


]]> 2023-06-13 20:14:55 UTC https://padlet.com/sotomer2/wud7ugz6behqld5m/wish/2622611177 sotomer2 https://padlet.com/sotomer2/wud7ugz6behqld5m/wish/2622613221  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.]]> 2023-06-13 20:18:37 UTC https://padlet.com/sotomer2/wud7ugz6behqld5m/wish/2622613221 sotomer2 https://padlet.com/sotomer2/wud7ugz6behqld5m/wish/2622613718 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.
]]> 2023-06-13 20:19:10 UTC https://padlet.com/sotomer2/wud7ugz6behqld5m/wish/2622613718 sotomer2 https://padlet.com/sotomer2/wud7ugz6behqld5m/wish/2622617813 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. 

]]> 2023-06-13 20:26:03 UTC https://padlet.com/sotomer2/wud7ugz6behqld5m/wish/2622617813 sotomer2 https://padlet.com/sotomer2/wud7ugz6behqld5m/wish/2622619191 https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2021/08/un-experts-call-end-police-brutality-worldwide]]> 2023-06-13 20:28:25 UTC https://padlet.com/sotomer2/wud7ugz6behqld5m/wish/2622619191 sotomer2 https://padlet.com/sotomer2/wud7ugz6behqld5m/wish/2622619226 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]]> 2023-06-13 20:28:31 UTC https://padlet.com/sotomer2/wud7ugz6behqld5m/wish/2622619226 sotomer2 https://padlet.com/sotomer2/wud7ugz6behqld5m/wish/2622619515 https://www.aclu.org/news/criminal-law-reform/the-biden-administrations-executive-order-on-policing-is-a-foundation-to-build-upon]]> 2023-06-13 20:29:07 UTC https://padlet.com/sotomer2/wud7ugz6behqld5m/wish/2622619515 sotomer2 https://padlet.com/sotomer2/wud7ugz6behqld5m/wish/2623241092 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.]]> 2023-06-14 08:58:51 UTC https://padlet.com/sotomer2/wud7ugz6behqld5m/wish/2623241092 sotomer2 https://padlet.com/sotomer2/wud7ugz6behqld5m/wish/2623755894 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.]]> 2023-06-14 20:31:46 UTC https://padlet.com/sotomer2/wud7ugz6behqld5m/wish/2623755894 sotomer2 https://padlet.com/sotomer2/wud7ugz6behqld5m/wish/2624718554 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. ]]> 2023-06-15 16:42:40 UTC https://padlet.com/sotomer2/wud7ugz6behqld5m/wish/2624718554 sotomer2 https://padlet.com/sotomer2/wud7ugz6behqld5m/wish/2624721221 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

]]> 2023-06-15 16:47:02 UTC https://padlet.com/sotomer2/wud7ugz6behqld5m/wish/2624721221 sotomer2 https://padlet.com/sotomer2/wud7ugz6behqld5m/wish/2625502742 2023-06-16 12:08:20 UTC https://padlet.com/sotomer2/wud7ugz6behqld5m/wish/2625502742