On February 26th, 2012, 17 year old Trayvon Martin was shot on the streets of Sanford, Florida, because he was perceived as threatening by local vigilante, George Zimmerman. Following Martin’s death, the nation was both shocked and outraged. How could something of racist nature occur here, in America? Yet this wasn’t the first incident, it was the first time the populace found out. In the United States, African Americans are two and a half times more likely to be killed by police than their white counterparts, though they may not even be committing a crime.…
Racial profiling has connections in law enforcement and the community causing biased factors in which can result in problematic factors on both sides. In law enforcement each individual officer to have their own part of racism. There has been arguments throughout the media and articles complaining their own side of the story of how an individual being the opposite race to the officer has been treated poorly and severely. Racial profiling is not something new that is happening now thus, it has been around since the early 1700s. Not only is this making law enforcement look bad but, for a community to not have a relationship to an officer again within the help for a community.…
It takes a lot to fathom the events happening between police and people of color. As the author of article stated, “to fully understand the people and the events we must use science and develop a sociological imagination.” Looking at the pieces of social and historical evidence all is required to fully understand the whole picture of why this event was an effect of a much deeper cause. The most important to me is the expanding U.S. inequality and the war on drugs. Palmer described the expanding U.S. inequality as started after the economic boom after WWII.…
It’s being broadcasted by the media in today’s society, that police officers are killing Black American males and females, due to the color of their skin. I am a Caucasian police officer in a community that is predominately Black American. I take retribution daily because of the media’s portrait of law enforcement’s officer involved shootings with Black American suspects. Most Caucasian officers have faced the same retribution in their societies. The media does not look at the statistics of officer involved shootings.…
In 1991 four cops beat a African American male named Rodney King because they felt “Threatened” or believed that he wanted to cause harm to the four cops. Rodney was wearing black and they believed anything that is black is bad. (“Mass Media and Racism” The Yale Political Quarterly) This was instilled in these men by the media showing their racial bias, this is shown in Westerns and the movie “The Birth of a Nation”.…
There are always two sides to a story, it is important for us to learn to look at things through different points of views rather than just being one sided when it comes to things going on around the world. We have to learn to look at things through somebody else’s perspective, even if we do not completely agree with the thoughts or ideas that we are being presented with. In this current day and time, police brutality towards African Americans is shown to us on the daily through social media, newspaper articles on the daily evening news broadcast. Recently I have come across a number of articles trying to convince us and inform us that police brutality is really happening around us.…
White people are automatically protected and given the benefit of the doubt when confronted by the police by having white privilege. White privilege works in our world in many ways; it provides white people with many advantages and immunity to challenges people of color face. The protection of whiteness shapes the world we live in and is not easily deconstructed in any system. For example, a person of color, especially a black person, is not guaranteed the same treatment by cops that are given to white people. In Philando Castile’s case, he did everything the officer asked of him.…
Although there have been many efforts and legislations passed to end racial disputes, none have truly passed the test, as racial altercations have been an issue since the 1800’s and continues to still be a problem today. Honorable individuals such as Martin Luther King, Thurgood Marshall, and even Rosa Parks, just to name a few, have all done their parts in trying to raise awareness to end racism in the states. One of the more prestigious racial riots is the one that blew up in Ferguson, Missouri, after a young black man, Michael Brown, was killed by a white police officer after he stole from a convenience store and appeared to have posed a threat to the officer as he approached. Even after all attempts to end racism from the 1800’s to the…
Hate crimes is listed as the number one priority of our Civil Rights program. As defined from FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) Program, hate crime is a traditional offense like murder, arson, or vandalism with an added element of bias. It is also defined as a criminal offense against a person or property motivated in whole or in a part by an offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, or gender identity. Hate crimes happen often enough in the society that it has a multitude of myths and speculations. Hate crimes can include single-bias incidents, racial bias, religious bias, sexual-orientation bias, ethnicity/national origin bias, disability bias, and much more.…
During the 1900s, many African American people emerged in the public eye such as Martin Luther King, Jr and Malcolm X, who continued to fight for the equality of black people. In 2008, when Senator Barack Obama was the first black male to be elected to be the president of the United States, some people credit this time in history as the day racism died. They believe if Americans can elect a black person to run our country, racism against black people must be something of the past (Brunners, 2015). Almost immediately after becoming the president-elect, he started receiving threats and hate mail, purely because of the color of his skin (Neiwert, 2016).…
Racism has been around for many years and it is an issue that has never been fully resolved, although some may believe that it has. It is not uncommon to see crimes being mentioned everywhere but thanks to the media, we have seen the many incidents occurring recently involving white cops and black men, hence we have come to realize how racist we really are as a society and how big of an issue racism actually is even now. In the textbook Classical and Contemporary Sociological Theory, we are introduced to some of the first sociologists and their theories. Two sociologists that are relevant to present issues about racism would be Emile Durkheim and W.E.B. Du Bois.…
In the United States, many African Americans are being racially profiled by the public and law enforcements in such distasteful light. Racism is an issue that is real and is still being practiced by many citizens and law enforcers in the United States. This is a serious matter that not many people realize is still a problem for the lives of minorities. Americans ignorantly think that racism is something of the past and that these races having nothing to worry or that they deserve what they got from getting violent treatment from an officer; this mindset that many white Americans have is far from what is actually going on. Racial profiling is common amongst the police force and is becoming cruder and problematic to these individuals that are being attacked.…
Police brutality and racism seem to be consistently connected to one another. This has become a serious issue in which circumstances have ended violently or even fatally when involving police officers and African American citizens. In 2014, the United States Census Bureau reported that African American people make up only 13.2% of our population. Anyone can become a victim of police brutality, regardless of their race; but statistics show that African American people are being killed by police at more than twice the rate of Caucasian and Hispanic people. It is also considerably more likely for the African American victims in these situations to have been unarmed at their time of death.…
“Black Lives Matter” Movement & Police Brutality As much as the subjects of “Black Lives Matter” and police brutality are getting stale and cliché, unfortunately it is still an issue that will not be corrected by hushed complaints and sweeping under the rug. However, this problem is not brand new; it has only escalated. Racial discrimination began in the times of slavery and has been an issue since—well forever. The discrimination has been toughest on minorities—like the African-American community. Along with the racial discrimination from society itself, some police and law enforcement figures have often abused their power and taken advantage of their place in the majority race.…
Prejudice or racial tensions have become a fore fronting scapegoat for police brutality. Individuals have accused police officers and vice versa of being racists and treating them of lesser quality as other races. “Although black men make up only six percent of the U.S. population, they account for forty percent of the unarmed men shot to death by police this year.” (Kimberly, Fisher, Tate, Jenkins) That means that African-American males create a little over half of the population shot by police officers this past year.…