Racial Bias In Law Enforcement

“More Whites Killed by Police, but Blacks 2.5 times More Likely to Be Killed.” Chicago Tribune. N.p., 11 June 2016. Web. 13 Apr. 2017.

Chapter 4 in The Color of Justice: Race, ethnicity, and crime in America, was about the relations between society and law enforcement officers. This has been a major topic, especially in the United States for a long time. The unfortunate statistic that minorities are more likely to encounter being killed, arrested, and victimized by excessive physical force; has been a real issue even in today’s society. However, police departments are trying to combat the way police officers interact with the community; especially those of color. Although steps have been takes there are still some instances where police aggression happens. With all of the issues that arise between certain minority populated community’s police it is evident that conflict

As difficult as their job may be, and as big a toll as it may take on them emotionally, it is important to bear in mind that police officers are normal human beings with normal brains and mental processes. Consequently, they are prone to make the same stereotype-biased judgments the rest of us are. Because they are often operating under conditions of uncertainty, high discretion, and stress and threat, the pervasive stereotypes linking Blacks and Latinos with violence, crime, and even specifically weapons are likely to cause them to make misattributions in seeking to disambiguate the intentions and behaviors of citizens. This can lead to racially disparate rates of stops, searches, arrests, and use of force. Several interventions that aim to reduce bias or discriminatory behavior at the individual level warrant further investigation in the policing context. Nonnegative intergroup contact is especially promising given its strong evidence base and that it could be achieved through

Ironically, “Cops killed nearly twice as many whites as blacks in 2015, 50 percent of the victims of fatal police shootings were white, while 26 percent were black. The majority of these victims had a gun or, were armed or threatening the officer with potentially lethal force.” “Alternatively, some believe that these statistics are

This paper provides an overview of the problems facing the police in their efforts to improve relations with minority communities in the United States, as well as a survey of previous research and existing literature on cultural diversity

Racism in police treatment of minorities has created great disparities in incarceration amongst the races. Blatant cases of racist law enforcement that are covered in the news are a testament to the fact that racism within police departments exists from coast to coast. However, these are only the cases that people find out about; there are countless other cases of police racism and brutality that are not reported.

The probability of being black, unarmed, and shot by police is about 3.49 times the probability of being white, unarmed, and shot by police on average (24 Frightening Racial) . If anything this is a very serious problem. No race should worry about be shot more than the other race. At least 70 police departments in the United States arrest Blacks 10 times the rate they arrest people who are not black (24 Frightening Racial). This goes to show that officers are doing very little to improve their actions with African Americans.

The use of racially bias policing isn’t a new phenomenon, however, there is very little data on its use and practice. A lot of that accounts for the fact that determining that a law enforcement officer used racial bias as a method to stop, question and frisk a person is substantially hard. Furthermore, racially bias policing has been an issue facing police since the creation of the first police agencies in the country and since the civil rights movement; however, the public has now become more aware of the phenomenon because of various accounts portrayed in the media; such as the death of Amadou Diallo in 1999.

"Relations between the police and minority groups are a continuing problem in many multiracial societies. Surveys consistently document racial differences in perceptions of the police, with minorities more likely than whites to harbor negative views." (Weitzer and Tuch, Race and Perceptions of Police Misconduct, 2004)

Based on The Guardians statistics, police killed more white people than any other race last year (People). However, activist like the Black Lives Matter Movement argue that police kills blacks at a rate disproportionate to their total percentage of the population (People). Police killed almost five black people per every million black residents of the U.S, compared with about two per million for both white and Hispanic victims (People). Shootings were the most common cause of police-related death, at 680(People). Of the 161 unarmed individuals, 71 were shot by police (People).

Police brutality is a problem in our society mainly because there are police officers that are getting away with not only physically hurting innocent people, but murder as well. In the past year, there have been between 865-939 cases of people being shot and/or killed by cops (Calacal 1). Racial profiling is one of the main factors in this problem. African Americans and Latinos are the people we see being abused by police on the daily. So far this year, 215 African-Americans and 94 Latinos have been killed by police. Data shows that a black person is 3 times more likely to be killed by a police than a white person. Several officers

Many people in the minority community believe that white police officers are far more responsible for abusive conduct toward minorities than any other group(2). The authors of Beyond the Rodney King Story conclude that “ Police abuse in America largely consists of white officers abusing minority citizens. Rickie Clark of the National

The institutional racism in law enforcement is often discussed on

Racial Bias are a direct correlation to police violence against African Americans, stereotypes perpetuated by social constructions and media representation along with individual prejudice help by police officers view African Americans as a threat especially African American men. Police trust this ideology of “threat” to assist in their use of excessive force against African Americans to comply. (Tyler, 2011; Tyler et al., 2015, Skinner, Haas,2016).

develop training for police to combat, reduce, and ultimately end racism during police interactions with African Americans.