Police Brutality In America Essay

Police brutality in America is causing a real concern for the safety of the American public. In states where police brutality reports are most common, such a Louisiana, there almost 2,000 Police Brutality reports filed every year, (Everett). There are many things that factor into the statistics of Police brutality, including race, gender, and geographic region. Based on research from Academic Journals as well as reliable .org websites, “Often officers disproportionately use violence when in direct confrontation with “minorities” as an evolved reflex from on the job trauma,” (Everett). An example of this was seen in the 2012 case where a mentally ill African American man by the name of Milton Hall was shot at 46 times by all white police officers for possessing a pen knife and holding it in a threatening manor not closer than 10 feet in proximity to the closest officer, (ACLU). Situations like this is the exact reason that the U.S. police force is under such scrutiny, which has many people pitching ideas on how to fix this problem. A proposed solution to this problem is to equip every policeman in the nation with a videocamera on their person

Statistics show that two of the three states with the most reports on police brutality are southern states with many cities within these states having a vast majority of its population being African American (Louisiana & Mississippi). These specific cities often have a predominately white police force, (Everett) which creates obvious issues for the well being of these towns. Although America as a whole is growing toward eliminating racism as a whole, these southern American cities are notorious for having racist tendencies. This can lead to profiling, unjust arrests, and stereotyping which all can be the beginnings of altercations that turn into brutality by police