Writing for the Public

Unit #2- First Draft

What is the source of police brutality?,What are the reasons for such terrible things? This  Are questions which i constantly ask myself, although i have yet experience police brutality in a personal level i have seen it more times that i can count through the news, social media, and even in person but the worst thing about it is that while all of that is going on it is hard to take action because even if the right thing is to help the victim you could potentially become a victim yourself. An example of police brutality that had the biggest impact in society would be the sad death of George Floyd and the reason for this was according to CNN.com “Chauvin kept his knee on Floyd’s neck for nearly eight minutes, the statement said, and he continued kneeling on Floyd’s neck for two minutes and 53 seconds after he became unresponsive.” The policeman kept using brute force against George Floyd even after going unconscious, this event led people to believe that it was an act of racism since the victim George Flyod and the policeman was a white officer. I believe that police brutality has many reasons and many sources  such as racism/racial discrimination and even fear.

Police brutality. when taking a step back and really thinking about what this means you can get ideas like violence, murder, abuse of power and even fear. Some people just brush it off their shoulders in order to stay out of it and think things like “that’s not my problem” which is wrong, although we can not help in a big scale on our own, we can make a difference if join in as a community because believe or not this affects everyone no matter who you are or where you come from, today could be me but tomorrow this could happen to you because this is out of control. The reason why this topic is so important to everyone and their communities is because police brutality affects everyone not just blacks or hispanic or other races and just because the changes of a “white person” are much lower than a “black person” does not mean that a “white person” won’t be a victim of this cruel act.  And so it makes me think, are we truly free? because if we have been fighting for so long to be equal in and have the same freedom as others, is living in fear what we wanted? Living in fear just demonstrates not we are yet to really be free and so police brutality is in a way the same as it was many years ago where people would have to fear the police because just like now we feel powerless against them, if we need to trust in the police to come to our help we must trust that the color of our skin will not play a factor in the way we are treated. Although it is true that everyone is affected by this it does not mean we are equally affected, as previously mentioned people of color have a higher chance of suffering from police brutality than the so called “white people,” and the reasons for this is because of things like stereotypes which is things/titles that are placed on to a community by other communities. Reasons like these are what makes me believe that racism and police brutality are connected, if not one and the same.

What i believe the biggest factor in police brutality is racism, and this is because this has been the the source to so many tragedies throughout history and it still keeps affecting us to this days, this been a reason of police brutality affects a lot of people especially the people of color, living in fear of not knowing if they can trust in police officers or if they are who they should be running from i have already seen this happen multiple times where people of color would refuse to call the cops because they believe that they run a bigger risk when cops are around as well as innocent kids/teens and even adults would run out of fear from the cops because they fear what could happen. After researching i found something which made me believe that racism plays a big part in police brutality would be “Black men are nearly 2.5 times more likely than white men to die at the hands of law enforcement.” According to econofact.org black men have a much higher rate of dying by the hands of police officers than the white man.

According to  econofact.org “Roughly 1,000 people are killed by American law enforcement officers each year. While whites make up the majority of those killed” and so some people may argue that the amount of white victims that have died in hands of police officers are higher, the point of my argument is unjustified killing behind this incidents, while the black and hispanics numbers of victims are not so different compared to white victims, econofact.org also tells us how the numbers of unarmed in the black and white victims is about 40 percent, “Nearly half of the people killed by police in 2019 were Black or Hispanic and about 40% were not armed with a gun.” This is one of the biggest problems that we are facing today. 

I myself believe that if this keeps on we will have no one of whom we can count to protect us. A American rapper and occasional producer from Bronx, New York named Lawrence but better known by his stage name Krs-one quoted “You were put here to protect us. But who protects us from you?” This goes to show that we trust officers to protect us and they are the ones we go to when in need of help but when we fear them we stop thinking of them as our protectors.

Racism in police brutality is not something which can be completely eliminated or stopped. Sadly we have been trying to stop racism or to be equally treated no matter the color of our skin or our background but it has yet to completely disappear, although it keeps changing for what i think is the best i do not believe that things like this can be stopped. Although it close to impossible to stop police brutality, we can still do the best that we can in order to minimize the victims/make such a big problem like police brutality smaller and in order to do this we must first take care of the source of the problem and begin with racism, it is too late to change the present but we start looking at each other as been the same no matter the way we look and recognizing that no matter where we can from we can have a lot of things in common as well as differences, i think that really trying the best we can on teaching the young ones about the problems of racism and teaching them to do better will help make a better future and maybe one day stop police brutality even if it is close to impossible.

Finally to review everything which i have stated in my paper. Police brutality is a problem with many roots, which would also includes racism and there is no possible way to get rid of it in a 100 percent but there are ways in which we can work on to minimize this problem so that we may have a better future in which police brutality becomes so small that people will not have to talk about it but in order to do that we must first take care of racism this way we can solve the problem from one of its sources and potentially the biggest one of all.

 

2 Comments

  1. Mario

    hey professor as a reminder, for my final draft I will be using my nutshell as my second paragraph right after the introduction.

  2. Carrie Hall

    Here are your comments: http://somup.com/crfVqDbEVN

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