Author: Mario (Page 4 of 9)

“Humankind seems to have an enormous capacity for savagery, for brutality, for lack of empathy, for lack of compassion.” This is a quote from Annie Lennox,  known professionally as Lola Lennox, is a British singer, songwriter, and model. This is how I feel every time i see police officers using unjustified abusive force against others. Many lives are taken by officers because of the usage of brute force it’s like life is something which they have the right to take away or play with, when the reality is that you only live once and once it’s gone there is nothing which can make up for it. Unfortunately police brutality keeps taking many lives especially when it comes to black people or people of color. It is no wonder that Racial bias and police brutality are connected since this is something which has been going on for many years and it is still alive to this day.

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. 

when taking a step back and really thinking about what police brutality means you can get ideas like violence, abuse of power and even murder. 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. This reason why this topic is so important to everyone and their communities is because police brutality affects everyone not just blacks or hispanic. The police officers believe they can get away with all of this which makes the situation even worse.

it’s been well proven that there is racial bias in policing and the biggest factor in police brutality is racism, After researching i found something which proves 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 Desmond Ang, an  Assistant Professor at  Harvard Kennedy School Of Government, black men have a much higher rate of dying by the hands of police officers than the white men. And this is because “racism” speacially racial discrimination 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.

Also According to Desmond Ang, “Roughly 1,000 people are killed by American law enforcement officers each year. While whites make up the majority of those killed” this may lead to some people arguing that the amount of white victims that have died in hands of police officers are higher and so it has nothing to do with racial bias but 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, Desmos Ang also stated that 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.