In fact, this epidemic analogy was used last year in a report by Amnesty International.
Statistics bear out the claim.
Throughout the nineties, there have been sharply increasing levels of brutality complaints and reports of injuries and death at the hands of the police. One group, the Stolen Lives Project, an initiative of the October 22nd Coalition, the Anthony Baez Foundation and the National Lawyers Guild, has documented over two thousand recent cases of people who have been killed in encounters with police across the country. One aim of the Stolen Lives Project is to defeat the claim that police brutality incidents are merely isolated occurrences, which is usually the first line of defense from the authorities after a happening becomes impossible to ignore or deny. To fully understand the epidemic, one must consider the economic crisis that the United States faces today. Although the stock market has recently been at an all-time high, the disparity in wealth between those at the highest levels in our society and those at the lowest levels has never been greater.