A study recently found that young Black men are nine times more likely than any other Americans to be killed by police officers (Khan 723). Encyclopedia.com defines Police Brutality as “the use of any force exceeding that reasonably necessary to accomplish a lawful police purpose.” Police brutality is an issue that has been around since 1838, when the first police force was created in Boston, Massachusetts. However, it was not until July 13, 2013 that Black Lives Matter was created in response to George Zimmerman, whose “exceeding force” killed an unarmed 17-year-old boy, Treyvon Martin. The public debate that has been argued for many years now is whether or not police officers are right to use deadly force on unarmed black men? and whether racial profiling by police officers is the cause of the deaths of so many unarmed black men? In order to answer these questions, the facts about what has occurred must be analyzed thoroughly. As I touched on before, the first case that brought this issue to mass media public attention was the Treyvon Martin case, because it led to the creation of the Black Lives Matter movement. Since then, there have been a countless number of cases with very similar circumstances, unarmed young black males being shot multiple times by police officers. One particular case that caused massive amounts of …show more content…
It seems that the officers who fear black males, as the study presented before suggests, are allowed to shoot their weapons out of fear because the courts are protecting them. It is a police officer’s duty to be brave and not to act out of fear, but it seems as if the officers that are involved in killing these unarmed black men are only acting out of fear. There are so many cases where officers are acquitted or their charges are dropped. This has to do with the absence of video evidence and every police officer claiming that they were acting in