Peaceful Protests: The Black Lives Matter Movement

The United States of America is not doing very well in upholding some of the principles of The Declaration of Independence. You can tell this by looking at some of the protests going on in the united states such as the Black Lives Matter and the NFL players kneeling during the national anthem. The main principle the United States is not upholding well is,“All men are created equal.” The reason I stated this principle is because something you'll notice about some of the protests is that black people are usually the ones who are doing the protesting.

Race riots are one of the major news items we hear about via the media when a social crisis occurs. The riots in Baltimore, however, were not so much about race, but more about economic and social class separations. The riots began as a peaceful protest amongst the citizens of Baltimore over the death of one of their own, Freddie Gray. Gray was a young, African-American, from a financially lower class area of Baltimore. Unfortunately, he died while in custody of the Baltimore Police. While this is a tragic loss, he was unlawfully detained by the police (Sarlin, 2015) during this ordeal. On the surface, the riots may appear as a cut-and-dry race provoked, once they are looked into further, that is not necessarily the case.

For decades racial discrimination has been a reoccurring issue that has shaped the relationships across the country. Riots, in the case of the L.A. riots, are a form of venting and a negative form of freedom of expression. Almost immediately after the jury`s decision to seize the officers of charges that included assault with a deadly weapon and excessive use of force towards King, riots broke out across Los

In Ferguson, Missouri there was a shooting that resulted in law enforcement siding the oppressor rather than the 18-year old whose life was taken in the incident. Michael Brown’s killer never faced consequences for his actions, which resulted in a protest that practiced civil disobedience, but resulted in violence by the people destroying the community of Ferguson.  Many protesters used this event as a chance to speak up because they were always silenced. These people couldn’t understand the consequences of their actions. Many feared saying anything that the individual had witnessed because signs

When the judge, Bernard Kamins, who was Caucasian declared three of the four (also white) officers not guilty the public saw his decision very racist. The riots began in the evening after the judgment, and grew over the next two days, but they would continue for several days. Angry Los Angels residents went out to the streets to show their fury. “These people are angry and they have every right to be!” said a man to the news cameras during the destruction. Authorities failed miserably to control the people. As time went by the madness did not decrease but enlarged.

During the times of the riots, the Los Angeles Police Department played a significant role in the uprising of the event. After the video went viral of the four police officers brutally beating King, they were found not guilty of their crime. As there was specific evidence displayed for the jury, they still acquitted all four officers. Less than three hours after the verdict was announced, protesting and rebelling occurred. The verdict regarding the four police officers sparked the riots as Los Angeles citizens were not satisfied with the jury’s decision. Citizens were shocked by the response and did not agree with making police brutality seem acceptable. In an interview, Jody David Armour, a criminal justice and law professor at the University of Southern California, said, “there was ocular proof of what happened. It seemed compelling. And yet, we saw a verdict that told us we couldn't trust our lying eyes. That what we thought was open and shut was really “a reasonable expression of police control' toward a black motorist” (Sastry). From Armour’s own experience, he believes the police and the jury did not make the correct decision. The majority of the people who lived in South Central Los Angeles at the time did. People should feel protected by the police, however, no one within the city did. How can they when police officers are getting away with harming their own citizens?

Race and oppression are some of the contributing factors, and seem to be common threads in many violent encounters between rioters and police. There are several similarities between the Los Angeles and Baltimore riots. Communities and law enforcement organizations must analyze the root cause and improve relationships before, during, and after these encounters. Law enforcement leaders must take initiative to successfully handle the crisis and anticipate the community’s expectations to the desired response.

The article, “Black Lives Matter: Birth of a Movement”, by Wesley Lowery begins with the writer being arrested at a McDonald’s fast food establishment in Ferguson, Missouri. This arrest was due to the riots occurring after the death of Michael Brown, an eighteen-year-old high school student who was gunned down by a police officer. The riots were unorganized and unpredictable. They consisted of many citizens within the community, some questioning the chain of events that lead to the murder of Michael Brown, and others demanding and indictment of the officer that committed the crime. The article states, “Scores more stood on pavements and street corners unable to articulate their exact demands – they just knew they wanted justice.”

On April 29, 1992, the City of Los Angeles was surrounded in a riot in response to the "not guilty" verdicts in the trial of four white Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officers accused of unlawfully beating Rodney King. Six days later, when the fires were finally extinguished and the smoke had cleared, “estimates of the material damage done vary between about $800 million and $1 billion, 54 people had been killed, more than 2000 injured, in excess of 800 structures were burned, and about 10,000 people were arrested.”(Khalifah 89) The 1992 riots in the City of Los Angeles were arguably the most devastating civil disturbance in the history of the United States.

The Los Angeles Riots developed as a way to show frustration at the injustice that occurred at the expense of Rodney King, with the acquittal of the four white police officers. The escalation that occurred as a result, could have been prevented, had police chief Darryl Gates mobilized troops into the affected areas immediately, instead of prolonging the deployment. As a member of law enforcement, with over 42 years of experience, there is no way that he could not have anticipated the backlash that ensued. The complete brutalization and dehumanization of black people in the United States is appalling and it has led to inhumane, atrocious fall out that has had impacts that have carried forward to the present.

The shooting of sparked a nation-wide movement not only demanding justice for Mike Brown, but also protesting the racial discrimination deeply embedded in the criminal justice system as well as various institutions in the larger American society. Furthermore, jfdkjfjdakljk something about international recognition. Similar protests and riots have been springing up in other cities since 1960s, and police killings of unarmed black men happen once every 28 hours (Kahle, 2014). However, Michael Brown’s killing has led to the most sustained uprising against police violence in at least two decades, centered among the African American residents of Ferguson, and has rallied significant nationwide support as well as international attention (Kahle, 2014; Taylor, 2014). The killing of Michael Brown is by no means an isolated event, and presence of racial tensions, especially in the St. Louis area, was already present long before. The large-scale pushback that the killing of Michael Brown has set in motion, then, seems to have been the last straw, prompting the eruption of decades of pent up frustration at a racist and oppressive system. That being said, what are the previous straws that have slowly pushed the black community in Ferguson to the breaking point? What are the factors that have caused these tensions to boil over and erupt into such a large-scale upheaval? This paper will explore some of the

A necessary and common fight for equality has been one that has survived throughout all of man’s existence. Due to recent racial divide and the product of racial profiling, a movement has risen up to combat these common issues. The most recent and most well-covered is the Black Lives Matter Movement. Even though it has been lauded by some media sources and individuals as the next great movement to champion for civil rights, the Black Lives Matter movement is not the same as the African-American Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s nor is it likely to be as successful. If the Black Lives Matter Movement continues with discrepancies in ideology, lack of clear leadership, and trends of hate, the movement is doomed to fail.

In the United States, there has been many cases of Racial injustice. From the beginning of the start of the United States of America it was the injustice to the Native Americans being captured and used for slave labor while their bison be slaughtered for sportsmanship. But this paper is on the specific race of the African Americans. There are many races that have been racially profiled and ostracized by the English people. But the treatment that African Americans have endured even till this day is disheartening. African Americans have gone through enslavement during the early 1600’s to the mid 1800’s. Then the African Americans were obstructed by the Jim Crow laws creating the ‘Separate but Equal” propaganda during the late 1800’s into the 1960’s. After the abolishment of the Jim Crow Laws, people were considered equal until the recent actions of many police officers using deadly force on African American youths in the early 2000’s.

The Black Lives Matter movement has swept across America. It 's branched out with chapters in over 31 cities and held rallies and boycotts across the United States(Sidner). The Black Lives Matter movement started with the outrage of the death of a young man. It continues to take over headlines and raise awareness on police brutality and inequality. However, the movement has met resistance from the All Lives Matter group. This group thinks that Black Lives Matter is a movement to express hatred towards other races. However, statistics, the views of fellow citizens, and the overall purpose of the Black Lives Matter movement, can prove that the movement wasn 't meant to express hate on other races and that we need to support the movement instead of going against it.

According to Daniel J. Myers, a riot is a disruptive collective act of violence that is momentary, happens outside of everyday life, and results in damage to property or harm to individuals involved either directly or indirectly in the collective action (2013, p.3929). Despite the term having a formal definition, determining precisely what constitutes a riot is not an easy task. Drawing the line between collective acts of violence and riots is challenging and is done by most social scientists by intuition. During the 1960s, the act of rioting in the United States was associated with race-related collective actions in urban areas. Most riots involved a confrontation between police and African-American citizens, mostly young men (Myers, D. J., 2013, p. 3930). Nowadays, the term “riot” encompasses