Essay About Police Brutality And Tampa Bay

Police Brutality Should Be Addressed
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Police Brutality
Police work is dangerous. Sometimes police put in situations that
excessive force is needed. But, because some officers use these extreme
measures in situations when it is not, police brutality should be addressed.
The use of excessive force may or may not be large problem, but it should be
looked into by both the police and the public.
For those people who feel racism is not a factor in causing the use of
excessive force, here is a startling fact. In Tampa Bay, Florida, five men died
while in the custody of the Tampa Bay police Department (C.C. 27). The thing is,
the Tampa Bay Police Department is made up of mostly white officers, but of the
five men who died, none where white. Four of the five men that died where
African Americans, and the other man was a Mexican National.
If the incident in Tampa Bay does not show a person racism, this event
might. In New York City, an average of seven Latin Americans were killed a year
between 1986 to 1989, but in 1990, that number increased greatly. In that year,
twenty-three Latin Americans were killed by police gunfire.
When asked how he felt about racism being involved in police brutality,
Yussuf Naimkly of the University of Regina commented:
“Excessive police force against blacks has always been tolerated, because as a
formally enslaved minority African Americans are trapped in a cultural context
specifically designed to inhibit their development and thus minimize their
threat to white hegemony” (C.C. 72)
Executive Director of Police Misconduct Lawyers Referral Service Karol Heppe
commented, “Brutality against minorities is a daily occurrence in Los Angeles,”
she says. “The difference this time is someone videotaped it (C.C. 36).
Another shocking incident of police brutality occurred in Reynoldsberg,
Ohio. A group of offices named themselves “S.N.A.T.” squad. This acronym stood
for “Special Nigger Arrest Team” and they made it a point to harass African
Americans whenever.
“The number of people killed by police has gone down from the middle
1970s to the middle 1980s in major cities,” says Patrick V. Murphy, former
head of police commissions in Detroit, New York, and Washington, D.C. (C.C. 17).
Also, in Kansas City, Missouri, a police department there has 1,110
officers. Amazingly, the only received approximately 108 complaints from the
public about those 1,100 officers.
Adding to the belief that police brutality isnt a very big problem,
most legal authorities and officials agree that the use of excessive force by
police officers is going down. In fact, they say that they see brutality
declining from twenty years ago (C.C. 57).
Police brutality is defined as involving the unnecessary and unjustified
use of force be that either physical or verbal. Gerald Williams, president of
the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) commented, “Let me assure you we are
committed to a professional level of policing with an emphasis on fairness,
humanity,