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Police Brutality Essay

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According to Wihbey and Kille in their article “Excessive or reasonable force by police? Research on law enforcement and racial conflict.”, police brutality is a problem, and especially a problem for teenage colored boys. Young black males are actually twenty one times more likely to undergo police brutality by getting shot than a white male of the same age. Racial Profiling--people of color being more likely to be stopped by an officer--is also a growing problem with our society. Whether or not an officer will admit it, he/she--whether white or black--sees young black males as more suspicious due to the amount of street crime produced by this specific type of person. After years of working in conditions like that, an officer’s “good will” will be compromised.
Available statistics on police brutality is also not one hundred percent accurate. Data on lethal and nonlethal force by police officers is not consistently reported to the FBI through their Uniform Crime Reporting Program. Reporting this data is purely voluntary on behalf of an officer, leaving data incomplete and unreliable. This also leaves the statistics the public has, puzzling. For example, during the time periods of 1999-2011, Oklahoma had the highest rate at which people of color were …show more content…

Use of conducted energy devices can also reduce the statistical rate of injury to suspects. Conducted energy device use has risen significantly by seventy percent. Conducted energy device use was also ranked as one of the most-used tactics for police officers during the time period of 2005-2008, and excessive-force complaints against officers more than doubled from 2003 to 2008. Although that seems like an alarming statistic, keep in mind only twenty percent of officers collect injury data in a

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