Police Brutality And Racism In The US

After reading and analyzing Black Boy and various current articles, I am now able to draw parallels between how whites treated of African Americans in two different times. Coming into this project, I knew about present day race issues and the form in which racism presents itself, however I have certainly learned many new things about police brutality and what motivates it. Since the early 1900’s and long before(when Richard Wright was growing up), racism has been a frequent theme in America. However, racism has changed and evolved. Racism used to be mainly expressed explicitly, whereas nowadays racism has changed to being implicit. This means that people make presumptions and have prejudices about race subconsciously. Racism can range from
The number of incidents of police brutality has been decreasing steadily for many years. The media’s accentuation of fatal police shootings makes us think that police brutality is happening all the time; whereas it is a relatively rare case. This can be shown if you take a look at a large city, such as New York. When the New York Police Department began creating records in 1971, police shot three hundred and fourteen people, and ninety four of them were fatal. In 2015, (most recent available data) police shot twenty three people, and there was only one fatality. This is a significant improvement; over forty four years, the number of deaths directly caused by the NYPD went from ninety four to one. I am very happy to see the decline of unjustified murder by the police. Although some may disagree, I believe that it is great that the media is focusing on this issue, because it raises awareness and promotes progress towards racial equality in
I was partially correct, however, I have learned that racism is not the only factor behind why African Americans are often the victims of police brutality. This is a very naïve view on the subject, because like life, nothing is black and white. Although police kill more white people each year, that is because roughly sixty three percent of America is caucasian, while only around thirteen percent is made up of African Americans. However, keep in mind that whites are the majority of the population, so more African Americans are killed by police per capita. Why is this so? Well, it is a combination of several factors. In many cases, this unnecessary violence is motivated by a combination of racial prejudices, and fear. According to US News and World Report, civil rights attorney Constance Rice interviewed over nine hundred police officers and discovered that many cops acted out of fear. From these interviews, many cops came forward and said that they were afraid of black people. Rice says, “Cops can get into a state of mind where they're scared to death. When they're in that really, really frightened place they panic and they act out on that panic. I have known cops who haven't had a racist bone in their bodies and in fact had adopted black children, they went to black churches on the weekend, and these are the white cops. But you