POLICE BRUTALITY PROPOSAL ESSAY
The police force, once considered the force that saves and protects lives and maintains
peace, is no longer doing just that. Actions contrary to the expectations have integrated too, as
the use of force and brutality has risen over time. The brutality of police personnel that has
become almost characteristic of the current police force endangers the lives of citizens through
misuse of power. And the considerable number of people who have lost their lives to it has made
police brutality an issue on its own. Police brutality refers to the systematic abuse of police
powers and misuse of authority allotted to police personnel during their official duties. Between
2000 and 2017, 461 fatal police encounters occurred in Canada. The seriousness of police
brutality and the death risks involved make it a problem worth solving timely to prevent
irreversible damage. Four ways to curb police brutality include demilitarization, increasing
training time, employing procedural justice training models, and countering racial
discrimination.
The receipt of military equipment increases multiple dimensions of LEA militarization
(material, cultural, organizational, and operational), and that such increases lead to more violent
behavior (Delehanty, Mewhirter, Welch, & Wilks, 2017) Therefore, demilitarization of police is
the first crucial step to decrease police violence and brutality. Demilitarization basically
encompasses taking away the military equipment that the police force has been supplied in bulk
quantities, restricting their usage against unarmed citizens, and eradicating the military-style
tactics, that they are taught, in police academies. As the likelihood of using more pens to write
or draw increases with the increase in the availability of pens, the prospect of using military gear
also increases greatly when they are available, especially in situations that call for the use of
force. Research shows a positive link between militarization and police violence, and many
instances have demonstrated that. In June 2020, during the protests against police violence after
George Floyd's death, Seattle police officers used flash-bang grenades, military-style percussion
devices toward a crowd of demonstrators. The use of flash-bang grenades and blast balls left
many injured, making it an unsafe way to disperse the crowd, but had the police not been
equipped with these grenades, they would have resorted to using safer equipment like tear gas
grenades or water cannons which were also available. This reiterates the importance of
demilitarizing the police for reducing police brutality and related violence and death.
In addition to demilitarization, increasing the training time at the academies before
deployment and rightly distributing it holds great importance for reducing police brutality. On
average, police officers only receive about sixty hours of training in law, studying constitutional
law, federal transportation law, federal criminal law, state traffic laws, state criminal law, local
ordinances, and civil liability. To grasp all of it and be trained adequately, sixty hours is too little
of a time. A lack of training time prevents the automatization of operational techniques (Jager,
Klatt, Bliesener, et al. 2013; Körner & Staller 2019). Inadequate training causes problems so,
increasing the police training time is necessary. In addition, correctly distributing time,
incorporating things like de-escalation training, etc., is critical to shifting the focus away from
misusing power and prioritizing peace maintenance. Typically, police trainees spend over sixty
hours learning how to fire and just eight hours training how to de-escalate possibly aggressive
situations.
Besides, since the current training at police academies equips police with an expectation
of harm and teaches them to be afraid and shoot first, think later, the fear-based training models
and military-style training need to be excluded. On various occasions, this expectation of harm
has led police officers to shoot innocent civilians. Just recently, in April, Daunte Wright, a 20-
year-old boy, was shot and killed during a traffic stop in Minnesota by police officer Kim Potter.
Effective alternative to current training with positive outcomes, procedural justice training
models, must be incorporated. The procedural justice model of policing, which emphasizes
transparency, explaining policing actions, and responding to community concerns, has been
identified as a strategy for decreasing the number of interactions in which civilians experience
disrespectful treatment or the unjustified use of force. (Wood, Tyler, & Papachristos, 2020) A
training program in Chicago that encouraged 8,480 officers to adopt procedural justice policing
strategies resulted in reduced complaints against the police by 10.0% and decreased use of force
against civilians by 6.4% over two years.
Other than that, deep-seated discrimination contributes to police brutality significantly as
racial profiling has become a norm amongst the police force. Research has demonstrated that the
risk of being killed as a result of the use of excessive force by police in the United States varies
by racial and ethnic group membership (Edwards, Lee, & Esposito, 2019), and blacks are
significantly more likely to experience police brutality than are Whites (Kahn, Goff, Lee, &
Motamed, 2016). To counter discrimination-based police brutality, anti-bias testing before
deployment of police personnel, avoiding high discretion searches, and communicating racial
stereotypes are necessary. One major takeaway from the National Justice Database so far is that
police are more likely to display racial bias when they conduct a "high-discretion search,"
usually done on a hunch in ambiguous circumstances, versus a "low-discretion search," a more
routine activity, for instance when a person has already been detained for a crime. When the
California Highway Patrol banned high-discretion searches, racial disparities began to level off
(Abrams, 2020).
Conclusively, the issue of police brutality has only increased in recent times. Although
there is no replacement to the lives lost to police brutality, solving it can prevent further murders
and lessen the suffering of families of victims. Without realizing its gravity, many lives will
remain at risk so, many factors at play that contribute to police brutality need to be addressed
appropriately to lessen it and over time diminish it completely. Acting upon the proposed
solutions and acknowledging their affectivity can put an end to police brutality and also help
restore the status of the police force as protectors of life and guardians of peace.
References
Abrams, Z. (2020, October 1). What works to reduce police brutality. Retrieved from
AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION:
https://www.apa.org/monitor/2020/10/cover-police-brutality
Campaign Zero. (2021). Training — Campaign Zero. Retrieved from Campaign Zero:
https://campaignzero.org/train.html
Delehanty, C., Mewhirter, J., Welch, R., & Wilks, J. (2017). Militarization and police
violence: The case of the 1033 program. Research & Politics, (2), 205316801771288.
https://doi.org/10.1177/2053168017712885
Edwards, F., Lee, H., & Esposito, M. (2019). Risk of being killed by police use of force
in the United States by age, race-ethnicity, and sex. Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences, (34), 16793–16798. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1821204116
Jager, J., Klatt, T., & Bliesener, T. (2013). NRW-Studie: Gewalt gegen
Polizeibeamtinnen und Polizeibeamte [North Rhine-Westphalian study: Violence against police
officers]. Kiel: Institut für Psychologie, Christian-Albrechts-Universität.
Kamb, L. (2020, June 2). Seattle police continue to use 'flash-bang' grenades during
protests, despite recommendations. Retrieved from The Seattle Times:
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/seattle-police-continue-to-use-flash-bang-grenadesduring-protests-despite-recommendations/
Körner, S., Staller, M. S., & Kecke, A. (2019). 'Pädagogik, hat man oder hat man nicht...
‘- Zur Rolle von Pädagogik im Einsatztraining der Polizei' ['"Pedagogy, either you have it or
not..."- On the role of education in police training']. M. Meyer & M. S. Staller (Eds.), Teaching
is learning: Methods, contents and role models in the didactics of martial arts - 8th Annual
Symposion of the dvs Komission "Kampfkunst und Kampfsport" (pp. 9–10). Vechta
Wood, G., Tyler, T. R., & Papachristos, A. V. (2020). Procedural justice training reduces
police use of force and complaints against officers. Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences, (18), 9815–9821. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1920671117