White Police Brutality

Due to the recent finding of police brutality, most cases involved a white male police officer using force against a person of color. History will lead us to believe that race of an officer will be the number one contributing factor in the use of excessive force. As I stated above, in recent cases it has been a white male using force against a person of color. However, studying some research studies, it has shown that the no matter what the race is of the officer, it has no causal effect on the use of excessive force. What I mean by this is not all cases dealing with excessive force involves race. In addition, in a study about Widening the scope on complaints of police misconduct. Policing, “not all excessive force cases consist of a white

In an article written by DePillis, he states “if there was to be an increase of black police officers it will not resolve the issue of police brutality because what people do not know it is more complex than we think” (DePhillis, 2014) . What he concludes saying is police brutality can happen with any officer. Before researchers concluded race has nothing to do with the amount of excessive force used by police officers. In addition, research has also shown that white police officers are not the only ones to use excessive force. Black police officers have also been known to use excessive force against black victims and are sometimes more aggressive and harsh than white police officers (DePhillis, 2014).

Even though the research on race has not been proven a contributing factor in the use of police brutality, there continues to remain negative perceptions related to race and gender contributing to police brutality. Based on prior experiences or what is

Further research has shown that police officers ages typically correlates to the years of experience and officers who are younger or has a young mindset receives more excessive force complaints than the ones who are older and with experience (Hassell & Archbold, 2010). The issue can result in different reasoning. For example, research concluded by Alpert and Dunham The Force Factor: Measuring Police Use of Force Relative to Suspect Resistance, has shown that police officers needs to do a better job on training new comers on policies and procedures in order to avoid incidents such as unnecessary use of force. Alpert finds that additional training will help serve the officers by reducing the number of incidents using excessive force, which includes, “training officers on how to gain control without using a gun, training officers on the correct amount of force to use based on the given situations, training officers on using pepper spray as a way to reduce any physical harm or the use of weapons, training officers to use the baton to restrain rather than shoot, training officers on conflict resolutions technique that can keep the situation under control rather than escalating (which female officers are found to be good at)” (Alpert et al., 1997). Police officers educational background also plays a factor