Analysis Of Sacramento Mayor Bias In Police Use Of Force And Not In Shootings

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A) The major concepts/issues in the article, "Sacramento Mayor Promises Police Reforms After Video of Fatal Shooting Made Public" by Anita Chabria is police brutality, which calls for immediate and major reform when it comes to policing among law enforcement agencies. The videos that were released by Sacramento Police Department and the Sacramento Bee show various angles of the scene. The victim Joseph Mann is a 50 year old black man who was seen by residents to be carrying a weapon, either a gun, knife, or both. In the video, he is displaying erratic behavior and is holding a knife, though the footage is not quite clear. Dispatcher told the officers that Mann was armed with a gun and a knife. However, police never found one and residents …show more content…

Findings from studies shown in the article, demonstrate that police officers are more likely to use nonlethal force with blacks than whites in similar situations. For instance, blacks are more likely to be pushed to the ground by an officer compared to whites. Even when the police said that civilians were compliant, blacks experienced more force. When it comes to the most lethal force (police shootings), the study finds no racial disparity or bias. The study examined more than 10,000 police shootings in ten major police departments in Texas, Florida, and California. These results contradict what most Americans believe after the tragic killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, and Philando Castile in Minnesota. Of course the study 's results led to much criticism concerning the scope of the data and the number of included police encounters from the wide spectrum. The study 's researcher, Roland G. Fryer Jr., a professor of Economics at Harvard University said that his work was not the definitive analysis of police shootings, in that more data would be needed to fully understand this phenomenon in its entirety (ex. the overall country). Fryer goes on the explain that the big gap between nonlethal force and lethal force might be related to the …show more content…

Although it is hard to not be bias when it comes to anything, it is possible to lessen occurrences of racial profiling. For instance, police agencies everywhere should have more training based on ethics and dealing with minorities as a joint class. Since America is a culture filled with white dominance and privilege, we should be more informed and made aware of how our actions affect and impact people of color. It is disappointing and disheartening to know that police brutality does occur and it frequently emphasizes the factor of race, the vast majority of these incidents involve African Americans. However, the rate of police brutality is not as high as we may think it is because we should also factor in media bias and how news outlets like to distort information that have obtained, in order to profit from them (ex. more viewers). We live in a world where live is unfair and it is extremely sad to know that black parents have to have the "talk" with their children about how to interact with the police, in fear of them becoming a potential target. In addition, police agencies should have stricter and not looser policies when it comes to officer conduct, so this can protect those individuals who are being regularly and constantly harassed by the police due to their skin color. It can be tough to implement this kind of policy because officers ' actions are not being

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