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How Does Force Affect Police Brutality?

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How Does Force Affect Police Brutality?
With times changing and individuals obtaining more powerful mobile, almost every move a person makes can be recorded or looked back on in some sort of way. With this great power, comes great scrutiny for not only everyday individuals, but for the individuals that protect us day in and day out. Law enforcement has suffered more scrutiny, and has obtained a substantial amount of media coverage over the past few years. This coverage has not been positive, and often highlights the mistakes, and aggressive actions taken by the officers of the law. With the framing of police officers changing from being outstanding citizens who uphold the law, to vicious animals who abuse their power, one begins to question the reasoning for all the brutality. In …show more content…
It can range from vulgar words and slurs used, ranging to excessive force used to detain or stop an a suspected criminal. The use of force is an area in which police officers must exercise good judgment. (Chapman, 2012) Often police have exercised great judgement, but more recently with the invention of image and video capturing devices, more cases of police brutality have been captured and recorded. One of the most agreed upon arguments of researchers is the point at which the use of force crosses the line from reasonable to excessive is necessarily hard to define and fraught with controversy. (Chapman, 2012) Often the complaints of excessive use of force, and police brutality are classified differently across different counties, states, and countries. Many researchers like Christopher Chapman choose to include every report of force used by the police in data used for research. The problem that arises is one of a lack of definition. In order for us to start effectively studying, and accessing police brutality, excessive force must have a universal police definition. It must be able to interpreted, and looked upon when officers actions are in question. By also setting a definition, officers will have a set limit to refer to when making behavioral …show more content…
Although an officer can receive immense amounts of education, training, counseling, advising, and supervision. The individual has free will to choose to do the correct thing or not. The reason for collecting the above data is to not only discover possible predictors of police brutality, but to also better understand criminals and officers. By collecting the metadata on criminals, crime prevention can not only be improved, but methods of help, and control can be produced to help individuals in need. As for the information collected on officers, the goal would to be to develop a program or equation that could predict potential conflicts given both the officers prior experiences, education, demographics, etc., and place them not only in a better patrolling location, but rather an area where they are less likely to use brutality irrationally. This program may not be fit for smaller cities where all variables aren't the same, but the end goal would be to tweak the program for each individual law enforcement area, to not only better understand the area that is being patrolled but to also ease the concerns of the public. With a program that can predict potential conflicts, concerns of the public would be eased knowing that everything that can be done to prevent problems statistically, is being

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