Police Brutality
Most victims of police brutality, including not only African Americans but also whites and other ethnic groups, have come from the ranks of the poor and low-income working classes. They have consequently lacked significant political influence or the financial resources that are sometimes necessary to effectively publicize complaints of police brutality. Nevertheless, antibrutality campaigns have been mounted in nearly every major U.S. city with a sizable black population. In sometimes large demonstrations, members of victimized communities have demanded, in addition to an end to police brutality and accountability for guilty officers, major reforms including the hiring of more African American police officers and the placement of more African American officers in supervisory positions, racially integrated patrols or black-only patrols in African American neighbourhoods, civilian review boards, and federal investigation (e.g., by the Justice Department) of egregious cases of police brutality. Their tactics have included sit-ins, boycotts, picketing, and close monitoring of police activity, including (from the late 20th century) by means of videos taken with handheld cameras and mobile telephones.
In 2014 the police shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, in Ferguson, Missouri, triggered protests nationally in the days after his death and again months later after a grand jury decided not to indict the police officer who killed him. In response to Brown’s death, activists launched a powerful social movement, Black Lives Matter. Two years later the movement led protests in more than 15 major U.S. cities following the killings by police of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Philando Castile in suburban St. Paul, Minnesota. In acts of retaliation against police violence toward African Americans, five white members of the Dallas police department were shot and killed during a Black Lives Matter rally in Dallas in July 2016, and three police officers in Baton Rouge were killed by a gunman about 10 days later.
Antibrutality campaigns tended to be led by activists at the grassroots level and by other members of the communities directly affected, rather than by more-established civil rights organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the National Urban League, whose memberships were drawn primarily from the black middle class. Indeed, black middle-class support for antibrutality protests was often limited, largely because, like their white counterparts, middle-class blacks generally favoured tough crime-fighting measures to protect themselves and their property from black criminals. Because they were relatively inexperienced as leaders, however, antibrutality activists often used direct and confrontational methods, preferring street protests over negotiations. And because they generally lacked an institutional base and a clear strategy, they were often reactionary, acting in an ad hoc fashion and creating organizations and developing constituencies as the need arose. Despite such limitations, they were usually effective, because they articulated the anger of their constituencies, who were generally suspicious of electoral politics (“the system”) and who had no faith that black politicians would adequately address their concerns.
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"Police brutality in the United States." Britannica Academic, Encyclopædia Britannica
Community Policing
Community policing suggests that police officers do better in keeping the peace when they work with community partners. Such partnerships include law enforcement agencies collaborating with other government agencies, selected individual community members, community groups, nonprofit organizations, service providers, private businesses, and the media.
In an effort to better realize the ideals of community policing, Congress created the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) as part of the broader Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. COPS creates linkages among local groups and individuals by providing information on crime control to all levels of law enforcement (including county sheriffs and municipal police officers), government leaders, first responders, scholars, students, and the general public. Some of this information includes how to build partnerships and how to better use technology to combat crime. Over the years, COPS has variously focused on terrorism, child abuse, bullying, violent crime, campus crime, gangs, and illegal drugs.
Some of its key programs—including Accelerated Hiring, Education, and Deployment (AHEAD), Funding Accelerated for Smaller Towns (FAST), Making Officer Redeployment Effective (MORE), and the Universal Hiring Program (UHF)—have provided funding for the hiring of hundreds of thousands of officers throughout the country, as well as new technology and equipment for these officers. COPS also has funded training on immigration law enforcement, DNA, ethics, federal law enforcement, regional community policing, and tribal law enforcement.
Community-oriented policing programs have been shown to be the effective in reducing gun crime. Building relationships with gangs—while sending the strong and repeated message that “if you use a gun, you'll go to prison”—and cooperating with local nonprofit agencies and businesses to help get young people get off the streets and back into school (or gainful employment) represent two of the most important strategies that community-oriented policing programs use to reduce gun violence. Among the better known of these “carrot-and-stick” programs are Project Safe Neighborhoods, Project Triggerlock, Project Exile, Operation Ceasefire, and the Boston Gun Project.
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Maddan, S. (2012). Community oriented policing services (COPS). In G. L. Carter, Guns in American society: an encyclopedia of history, politics, culture, and the law (2nd ed.). Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO
Is This America? Police/Gun Violence in Our Society
