Police Brutality: The Ultimate Guide
By: Amar Hassan
Tags: 2020, Racism, Police Brutality

Abraham Lincoln once said, “It is as much the duty of the government to render prompt justice against itself in favor of its citizens as it is to administer the same between individuals”, a theme that has withstood the test of time. At least, until now. Earlier this year, we heard the tragic news on George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, two names that police have burned into our memory, just two of the thousands of civilians that have been affected by police brutality. Oftentimes when ,we as a society, think of police brutality we limit our definition to the extreme cases broadcasted on the news and mainstream media. However, police brutality is much more than just the extreme and unlawful killing of civilians, it is not confined to the extreme cases, it can also be prevalent in more subtle ways. The definition of police brutality itself is any unlawful or unnecessary violation of our civil rights by an officer of the law, including but not limited to, physical or verbal harassment, physical or mental injury and much more. An officer is legally allowed to use physical forces or deadly forces but only when the situation calls for it, brutality is when it is unlawful and unnecessary, it is the abuse of the power we give officers in society. Practical solutions to solving police brutality including, but not limited to, gathering better data, holding officers and departments accountable, and demilitarization of the police force are available and should be applied because police brutality is a direct violation of citizens’ constitutional rights, especially when it is targeted at mostly a specific group of our society.

Why it happens

Essentially, there are two different yet interlocking views on why police brutality happens. One of them goes like this, in every department, there are several “bad apples”, these are the officers that receive numerous complaints, are overly aggressive, etc, these officers make up about 20% of the police force, yet they are responsible for around 80% of the misconducts and troubles in the department. In some cases, it’s more like 20% makeup 90% of the troubles. In other words, these rotten apples are spoiling the whole barrel, and civilians have to live with the results.

The second view is that the issue is systemic rather than individual, officers patrolling neighborhoods relentlessly create a feeling of oppression, of being jailed. So when officers use force in those mindsets, they are bound to be systematically more violent and unaware of it, more racist. Regardless of what lens is applied, the picture is still the same, seemingly racist and violent police brutality targeted at mostly minors.

Why nothing has been done about it

These police officers that are constantly causing trouble and receiving complaints are protected by a doctrine called qualified immunity. Qualified immunity protects government officials (including but not limited to police) from being prosecuted by civilians unless they have violated “clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known .” Basically saying that officers can get away with pretty much anything using this loophole. It was meant to protect officials from petty attacks but they now abuse that protection. This lack of accountability lets officers do what they want and not get sued.

On top of this, police unions are another layer of security these same officers have to depend on. These unions often end up protecting the officers that have been fired and get them back on the streets usually through appeals to protect labor rights. The union stands beside all their officers, including those bad apples that decide to abuse it, this gives officers a sense of being above the law, it makes them feel as if they can do anything they want and still be safe in their job. On top of that, police are offered “cooling off” periods of up to two weeks without questioning, they can create any kind of story during this “cooling off” period that citizens are not offered. Citizens are immediately detained and questioned for hours on end while an oftentimes guilty officer gets all the time to make up and tweak their story.

The systems in place to protect police officers are all in place to make sure they do not face any consequences, in other words, they are not held accountable for their actions. Not all officers are bad, but just remember 20% of the officers can make up for 80% of issues, and if those bad apples are allowed to remain in the bucket then the public perception of the entire police force is skewed.

So why does this issue continue to exist? Why has nothing been done about it? One of the leading causes of the stagnation of solving this issue is the lack of data on police brutality. The federal government has little to no data on the matter, and the data they do have is out of date. Most data collection comes from private companies that store the information in their databases. For example thanks to the Washington Posts data base, we now know that black men are four times more likely to get shot than their white counterparts. While this fact is a beneficial statistic, most of the time the data is not inclusive, while they may have information on a specific data point other points are hidden in the dark. Overall, the available information on police brutality is minute and choppy. A leading reason for this lack of data is the unwillingness of police departments to hand over their reports to the public. departments are not even obligated to submit complete data to the FBI. There have been legislations proposed to force police departments to report to a centralized data center. This would add a tremendous amount of depth to the data collected, including but not limited to race, age, the form of violence used, and more. With better data, lawmakers can make more informed decisions, it also shows how real the issue is and that it is not something that is not a national problem.

Practical Solutions

There is a platitude of available practical solutions, these include but are not limited to, cultural training, rigorous screening processes, accountability, improving data gathering, and demilitarization. Implementing these solutions would help to address and work on the issue tremendously. Police departments can take a variety of steps to retrain officers and perform certain things including:

Using specific forms of force in specific situations Restricting the use of chokeholds and strangling Requiring police to report all uses of or attempted uses of force Making it the responsibility of other officers to get involved if one of their colleagues is being violent Requiring more warnings before using force De-escalating situations in all possible ways Demilitarization

The tendency of police departments to increase militarization has a direct correlation with how aggressive a department is. Departments get their hands on military-grade equipment in a number of ways, but one of the most frequent ways is through something called a 1033 program. What this program does is give police departments leftover military equipment for the price of shipping. While this equipment may include basic supplies such as filing cabinets, gloves, and other stationery, the majority of the equipment received were items such as grenade launchers and large ambush vehicles. When police have access to these types of equipment their mindset shifts to a more aggressive point of view. Departments have continuously shown an increase in police caused fatalities when they have a higher percentage of military equipment. In the paper “TRENDS: Police Militarization and the Use of Lethal Force” published by Political Research Quarterly, the author Edward Lawson Jr found that in 4 years between 2014 and 2016, the more equipment sent from the 1033 program to departments, the more police caused deaths occurred, even after taking into consideration population numbers and other factors. It is clear as day when police have military equipment they start to believe they are in fact at war. The duty of the police is not to be at war with its citizens but instead to protect our streets. The police are not meant to be a frightening force, police officers should invoke a sense of security and rightfulness, not fear and hatred.

Of course, implicit bias and racism contribute a great deal, however, these are not issues that can directly be attacked. Instead, lawmakers and communities need to focus on practical and logical solutions that will make a change, solutions that might stop another brutal murder, solutions that could have saved countless innocent lives like that of Breonna Taylor or George Floyd. The issue of police brutality should not be argued, there is no “other” point of view, it is clear that the police have too much power that they, unfortunately, decide to abuse. Not all officers are bad nearly all are great civil servants, however, as a society, we cannot accept even one unfair and unjust death. A life is a life, one, or a hundred.