Police Brutality as a Social & Legal Problem
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Police brutality has long been a topic of concern in American society. The police face a difficult and dangerous job in maintaining law and order on the streets. From time to time, deadly force is necessary in order to carry out that job. Nevertheless, most people agree that the use of deadly force must be controlled. Usually, an officer is expected to practice restraint so that the use of force is appropriate rather than excessive. The problems of excessive force made the national news on March 3, 1991, when a group of Los Angeles police were videotaped while beating a suspect. The suspect, Rodney King, was a black man who had given the police a high-speed chase before finally being stopped. Unbeknownst to the officers, a citizen videotaped the incident from a nearby home. The tape showed some of the officers repeatedly kicking King and beating him with clubs, while several other officers stood around watching. Later, it was discovered that taped communications between the officers and their dispatchers were filled with racist slurs and derisive laughter. The nation was shocked when the news media revealed this event. A number of questions were raised in the wake of the King beating. For example, people wondered if the incident was an isolated event or if the majority of the police are violent in their methods of apprehending suspects (Lacayo, 1991, p.18). Also, because King was black and all of his arresting officers were white, questions were raised regarding
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r will get off on plea bargains or serve mockingly short sentences" (Lacayo, 1991, p.20).
Many people have charged that racism is a major cause for police brutality. The Rodney King case provided a vivid example which seems to support this claim. Jerome H. Skolnick, a professor of law at the University of California at Berkeley, has noted that "racist police are more likely to be brutal and brutal police are more likely to be racist" (Prudhomme, 1991, p. 17). In most cities, the centers for crime are the lower class areas where minorities live. By contrast, most police departments consist primarily of white men with middle class backgrounds. In the words of Lacayo, white police officers are generally sent "into large urban centers that are black and Hispanic and poor, with no understanding of the cultural differences, to enforce white, middleclass moral laws" (Lacayo, 1991, p. 20). Obviously, this is a situation which is prone to a great deal of racial tension.
Some critics of police violence blame the organization. For example, it has been noted that the emphasis in police training is generally on the use of weapons and arrest tactics, as opposed to the use of "sensitivity" (Gest, 1991, p. 26). Anthony V. Bouza, a retire
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Approximate Word count = 2268
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)
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