Police Brutality: A National Problem

On July 17th, 2014, Eric Garner, a forty-three-year-old black American man, died after a police officer held him in a chokehold for about twenty seconds. Garner’s friend, Ramsey Orta, recorded the entire event, where one can hear Garner repeatedly tell the officer, “I can’t breathe.” Despite this, a grand jury decided not to indict the officer who held him in the chokehold on December 3rd, causing nationwide protest. The protests did not change the fact, however, that Garner was provoked and ultimately killed by a police officer for no other reason than the fact that he was black—and that that police officer was allowed to go free.

Unfortunately, this is not the only case of police brutality towards innocent black Americans where these officers are not getting served justice. Michael Brown, an eighteen-year-old black man living in Ferguson, was shot by a twenty-eight-year-old police officer, Darren Wilson, but Wilson was also not indicted for his crime.

These shootings have struck a nerve among the American people. But it’s not as if there is a sudden surge in these occurrences—there’s just been more media coverage of these horrifying events. It seems as if we are now always hearing of more police brutality wrongfully directed towards blacks. In a Bustle article, it states that statistics confirm the fact that police shoot black men more. “The geographic diversity of these tragedies,” it states, “suggest that the problem is not centralized to one area of the country, but rather a widespread issue of concern.” An investigation made by a collaboration between ColorLines and the Chicago Reporter showed that, in the ten largest cities in the U.S., black Americans made up a disproportionate percentage of those killed in police shootings—in New York, San Diego, and Las Vegas, the percentage of blacks killed was twice their percentage of the city’s population. Nationally, blacks are also showed to be arrested three times more frequently than whites, even though their percentage of the population is 12% and they are 26% less likely to be carrying contraband. A 2008 Department of Justice Police Public Contact Survey reported that 74% of blacks felt that police used excessive force on them—a percentage that was much larger than what whites or Hispanics reported. When you look at police statistics in Ferguson, where Michael Brown was shot, it makes sense—despite blacks making up two thirds of the Ferguson population, the mayor, five out of six city council members, and 50 out of 53 police officers are white.

But looking beyond statistics, there are many examples of racism towards blacks that help promote or lead up to deadly police brutality. In Ferguson, there are examples of discrimination everywhere— Ferguson relies a lot on heavy fines, mostly towards blacks, for petty offenses to raise money. One woman received two parking tickets that were each $152, and because of court fees and other expenses, has paid $550, still owes $542, and has spent six days in jail. Blacks were also twice as likely as others to be searched randomly during traffic stops. If we look outside of Ferguson, one might notice the questionable stop-and-frisk program in New York, a practice in which officers pull over and question a driver before searching them for contraband. Judges have found that many of these stops are not based on any real suspicion about anything illegal, and most of the people pulled over are black or Latino. Even in the aftermath of deadly police brutality, there is still racism—especially concerning media portrayal. Very skewed headlines about deaths and crimes in blacks vs. whites have shown up everywhere in the media For example, Belluci, a white alleged murderer of his parents, was given this headline, “Son in Staten Island murders was brilliant, athletic—but his demons were the death of his parents,” whereas when Trayvon Martin was shot in 2012, NBC displayed a headline of, “Trayvon Martin was suspended three times from school.” In other words, headlines displayed the best traits of a white murderer while focusing on the disciplinary issues of a black victim. These aren’t the only examples—the Huffington Post displays many screenshots that truly show how the headlines may be treating white murderers better than black victims. This makes the #IfTheyGunnedMeDown hashtag so powerful—because when we inspect how the media portrays white murderers vs. black victims with a simple photo, we see how much of an impact those photos can make depending on if they are more favorable than another.

It is especially scary because, as Jeannine Amber notes in her viewpoint column of a Times article about police brutality, “Police are trained to ascertain risk, yet studies have shown they are likely to shoot at an African-American suspect faster than at a white one. What about the untrained civilian? Armed with bias and a handgun, how likely is he to see a threat where none exists?” Many black parents have stated that they have tried to give their children a “talk” to try and avoid these situations. Amber describes the lessons that parents give young black men: “If you are stopped by a cop, do what he says, even if he’s harassing you, even if you didn’t do anything wrong. Let him arrest you, memorize his badge number, and call me as soon as you get to the precinct. Keep your hands where he can see them. Do not reach for your wallet. Do not grab your phone. Do not raise your voice. Do not talk back. Do you understand me?” Later, however, she says, “…we realize with anguish there may be little we can do to protect them.” Maybe she’s right—but we can always do something in this quest. We can protest. We can stand against the harshness. We can demand that our country reshape and reform the way we think as a nation, that we retract racist practices, that we train our police officers not to shoot at unarmed, innocent black individuals. We must think about the ways that these tragedies could’ve been stopped—perhaps by advocating for every police officer to wear a body camera, which may shed light on certain scenarios and encourage police officers to act more lawfully when they are on duty. When we see unfairness and racism going on around us, we cannot just sit around. We must fight for justice. We must fight for people such as Eric Garner and Tamir Rice. “Don’t put your hands in your pockets,” some black parents say to their kids. We must fight so that one day, it won’t be necessary for anybody to say that anymore.