Police Brutality

9 Pages 2145 Words

ts the man.
Item: in New Jersey, a former prostitute bites a cop's finger and won't let go. He therefore fatally shoots her and is acquitted.
Item: in New Jersey, an honor student meets drunk white friends at a bar. The friends are "tearing up" the bar. The honor student tries to help clean the bar up, and in doing so, carries a concrete parking berm out of the bar. A cop waiting outside fears that the man will hit him with the berm, so he shoots him. The honor student dies; the cop is acquitted.
Item: In 1996 in Florida, a man is stopped by the police. He turns off his car. Then he takes his foot off the brake, and the car lurches forward several inches, as cars are wont to do. He is fatally shot. Rioting ensues.
These incidents are probably not the result of overt racism. These police were probably poorly trained. But is it a coincidence that all of the victims were Afriucan-American?
RACISM
People of all races are victims of unfair police treatment, but ethnic minorities are more likely to be victims. In addition to the cases mentioned above and Rodney King and racial slurs made by members of the Los Angeles police, examples abound. Ninety-one percent of the victims of police brutality are African American or Latino/a (according to an article in the magazine _in these times_), and 3/4ths of the victims of police killings are black (according to the American Civil Liberties Union web site). According to a Gallup poll of a few years back, about 9% of minorities and 4% of whites said that they had been "physically abused" or maltreated by the police. An Amnesty International report says that 76% of the approximately 1000 complaints made to the Civilian Complaint Review Board in NYC (the board that handles citizen complaints against police officers) between January and June, 1995, were made by blacks or Latino/as.
Item: An African-American honor student...