Search results
May 29, 2020 · The Long, Painful History of Police Brutality in the U.S. A 1963 protest placard in the Smithsonian collections could almost be mistaken for any of the Black Lives Matter marches of today
According to the 2020 Police Violence Report, 1,126 people were killed by police, of which in 16 cases police officers were charged with a crime. 620 of the deaths began with police officers responding to reports of non-violent offenses or no crime. 81 people killed by the police were unarmed.
- 17 July 2014: Eric Garner. Getty Images. A protest over the death of Eric Garner at the hands of New York police. Eric Garner died after he was wrestled to the ground by a New York police officer on suspicion of illegally selling cigarettes.
- 9 August 2014: Michael Brown. Getty Images. The killing of Michael Brown led to violent protests in Ferguson, Missouri. Michael Brown, 18, was killed by a police officer, in Ferguson, Missouri, who was responding to reports that Brown had stolen a box of cigars.
- 22 November 2014: Tamir Rice. Getty Images. A solitary toy is left as a memorial near where Tamir Rice died. Tamir Rice, a boy of 12, was shot dead in Cleveland, Ohio by a police officer after reports of a male who was "probably a juvenile" pointing a gun that was "probably fake" at passers by.
- 4 April 2015: Walter Scott. Walter Scott was shot in the back five times by a white police officer, who was later fired and eventually sentenced to 20 years in prison.
- Overview
- African Americans and police brutality
- The Great Migration
police brutality in the United States, the unwarranted or excessive and often illegal use of force against civilians by U.S. police officers. Forms of police brutality have ranged from assault and battery (e.g., beatings) to mayhem, torture, and murder. Some broader definitions of police brutality also encompass harassment (including false arrest),...
Americans of all races, ethnicities, ages, classes, and genders have been subjected to police brutality. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, for example, poor and working-class whites expressed frustration over discriminatory policing in northern cities. At about the same time, Jewish and other immigrants from southern and eastern Europe also complained of police brutality against their communities. In the 1920s many urban police departments, especially in large cities such as New York and Chicago, used extralegal tactics against members of Italian-immigrant communities in efforts to crack down on organized crime. In 1943 officers of the Los Angeles Police Department were complicit in attacks on Mexican Americans by U.S. servicemen during the so-called Zoot Suit Riots, reflecting the department’s history of hostility toward Hispanics (Latinos). Regular harassment of homosexuals and transgender persons by police in New York City culminated in 1969 in the Stonewall riots, which were triggered by a police raid on a gay bar; the protests marked the beginning of a new era of militancy in the international gay rights movement. And in the aftermath of the 2001 September 11 attacks, Muslim Americans began to voice complaints about police brutality, including harassment and racial profiling. Many local law-enforcement agencies launched covert operations of questionable legality designed to surveil and infiltrate mosques and other Muslim American organizations in an effort to uncover presumed terrorists, a practice that went unchecked for at least a decade.
Notwithstanding the variety among groups that have been subjected to police brutality in the United States, the great majority of victims have been African American. In the estimation of most experts, a key factor explaining the predominance of African Americans among victims of police brutality is antiblack racism among members of mostly white police departments. Similar prejudices are thought to have played a role in police brutality committed against other historically oppressed or marginalized groups.
Whereas racism is thought to be a major cause of police brutality directed at African Americans and other ethnic groups, it is far from the only one. Other factors concern the unique institutional culture of urban police departments, which stresses group solidarity, loyalty, and a “show of force” approach to any perceived challenge to an officer’s authority. For rookie officers, acceptance, success, and promotion within the department depend upon adopting the attitudes, values, and practices of the group, which historically have been infused with antiblack racism.
Because African Americans have been the primary—though certainly not the only—target of police brutality in the United States, the remainder of this article will deal mainly with their experiences, both historically and in the present day.
Interactions between African Americans and urban police departments were initially shaped by the Great Migration (1916–70) of African Americans from the rural South into urban areas of the North and West, especially following World War II. Most white communities, including white police departments, were unaccustomed to the presence of African Americans and reacted to their increasing numbers with fear and hostility, attitudes that were exacerbated by deeply ingrained racist stereotypes. Reflecting the beliefs of many whites, northern police departments acted upon the presumption that African Americans, and especially African American men, possessed an inherent tendency toward criminal behaviour, one that required constant surveillance of African Americans and restrictions on their movements (segregation) in the interests of white safety. Accordingly, by the mid-1950s many urban police departments had implicitly reconceived their missions as essentially that of policing African Americans—i.e., protecting whites against Blacks.
Students save 67%! Learn more about our special academic rate today.
Learn More
The forms of police brutality to which this situation gave rise were variable and generally not limited to physical assault (e.g., beatings) and excessive use of force. They also included unlawful arrests, verbal abuse (e.g., racial slurs) and threats, sexual assaults against African American women, and police homicides (murders of civilians by police). Police were also sometimes complicit in drug dealing, prostitution, burglaries, protection schemes, and gun-smuggling within African American neighbourhoods.
May 27, 2023 · In a 2021 study of emergency room data from hospitals in five states, researchers found a correlation between police killings of unarmed Black people and a rise in the number of...
The burden of fatal police violence is an urgent public health crisis in the USA. Mounting evidence shows that deaths at the hands of the police disproportionately impact people of certain races and ethnicities, pointing to systemic racism in policing.
Apr 29, 2021 · In 2020 alone, police killed more than 1,100 people. footnote4_afgs2mi 4 Mapping Police Violence, last accessed February 5, 2021, https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/. Black Americans are three times more likely to be killed by a police officer than white Americans and nearly twice as likely to be killed as Latino Americans.
