Police Killings: Racial Profiling In The United States

"It has been reported that some police officers stop motorists of certain racial or ethnic groups because the officers believe that these groups are more likely than others to commit certain types of crimes. Do you believe that this practice, known as "racial profiling," is widespread or not?"

What happened to Michael Brown Jr. in Ferguson, Missouri has resonated across the country with African Americans because all of us feel that it could have easily happened to anyone of us. Every incident involving a police officer and African male could’ve been avoided if the officers wanted them to. In Eric Garner’s case, for example, police targeted him for the petty crime of selling loose cigarettes, the types of crimes black people are targeted for

police killed 776 people, 161 of whom were completely unarmed at the time of their death. The data was compiled by The Guardian for a project called “The Counted,” a continuously updated, interactive database of police killings in the United States. Based on their figures, police have killed, on average, about three people per day so far this year. The Counted database is the most comprehensive information available on police killings, since no U.S. government agency maintains a similar listing, and this is were I’ve gotten information from for the numbers of people the police have plainly Murdered in 2015. Based on The Guardian’s statistics, police killed more white people than any other race this year. A total 385 white people have been killed by police this year, and 66 of them were unarmed at the time of their death. But, just 25 police officers have died from firearms-related violence in the same period. Now there is a small controversy conflict in the media because of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, which I think is just certain people dry hating. The tiny issue is that some people think by saying black lives matter that we mean all lives don’t matter; but me personally, I do have moments were all lives do not matter to me in a few instances only because of how they act towards me, but this is not the cases with everyone. However, activists like the members of the Black Lives Matter movement argue that police kill blacks at a rate disproportionate

While racial profiling can end in tragic police killings of unarmed individuals, such as with Eric Garner or Michael Brown, it also results in many unnecessary stops and searches, harassment and intimidation, and even confiscation of property without due process. The steps to curb this are clear: At all levels of government, we need definitive anti-profiling laws and policies, training of officers on the elimination of explicit and implicit bias, data collection on traffic stops and other police-community contacts, and development of internal and external accountability systems. With these efforts, police departments across the country can rebuild public trust and ensure that policing methods reinforce rather than undermine our democratic