Police Brutality In The Civil Rights Era

Police departments across the country too often use excessive force, injuring people suspected of crimes or even creating crimes against Blacks like Jim Crow Laws and occasionally killing them like in Rodney King’s death. Members of minority groups and the poor are frequently the victims of police brutality, which law enforcement agencies try to cover up. Police departments must shed their cover-up culture and institute reforms, such as strengthening civilian oversight boards, which can investigate and prevent incidents of police brutality. In the past, those who involved themselves in police violence may have represented with the unexpressed approval of the local legal system throughout the Civil Rights era. In the modern era, individuals
Colored codes, racist statutes, and government unwillingness to protect Blacks from imminent racial ferocity allowed members of the Ku Klux Klan to carry out terrible action with immunity. Since local officials were not interested in acting against white-on-black violence, police officers could also evade liability for abusing the civil rights of Black residents. “Lynching was accepted as a method of imposing law and order in the South and sustaining a social caste system. An anti-lynching movement was gradually legitimized and supported by the NAACP through legal challenges, but the law continued to criminalize Black behavior” (Civilrights.org). In the early years of the Civil Rights Division, felonious cases were constricted in amount and had inadequate effect. While the Division had the statutory power to take legal action against police brutality, the legal structures in the South were not equipped to work