Police brutality in the United States

March 7, 1965: Alabama police attack the Selma to Montgomery marchers on "Bloody Sunday"
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Police brutality is the use of excessive or unwarranted force by law enforcement against civilians. Police brutality involves physical or psychological harm to a person and can involve beatings, killing, intimidation tactics, racist abuse, and torture.

In the 2000s, the federal government attempted tracking the number of people killed in interactions with US police, but the program was defunded.[1] In 2006, a law was passed to require reporting of homicides at the hands of the police, but many police departments do not obey it.[2] Some journalists and activists have provided estimates, limited to the data available to them. In 2019, 1,004 people were shot and killed by police according to The Washington Post, whereas the Mapping Police Violence project counted 1,098 killed.[3][4][5] Statista claimed that in 2020, 1,021 people were killed by police, while the project Mapping Police Violence counted 1,126.[6][5] From 1980 to 2018, more than 30,000 people have died by police violence in the United States, according to a 2021 article published in The Lancet.[7] For 2023, Mapping Police Violence counted at least 1,247 individuals killed, making it the deadliest year on record.[8] The US police has killed more people compared to any other industrialized democracy, with a disproportionate number of people shot being people of color.[9][10][11] Since 2015, around 2,500 of those killed by police were fleeing.[12]

Since the 20th century, there have been many public, private, and community efforts to combat police corruption and brutality. These efforts have identified various core issues that contribute to police brutality, including the insular culture of police departments (including the blue wall of silence), the aggressive defense of police officers and resistance to change in police unions,[13] the broad legal protections granted to police officers (such as qualified immunity), the historic racism of police departments, the militarization of the police, the adoption of tactics that escalate tension (such as zero tolerance policing and stop-and-frisk), the inadequacies of police training and/or police academies, and the psychology of possessing police power.[14][15][16][17] The US legal doctrine of qualified immunity has been widely criticized as "[having] become a nearly failsafe tool to let police brutality go unpunished and deny victims their constitutional rights," as summarized in a 2020 Reuters report.[18]

Regarding solutions, activists and advocates have taken different approaches. Those who advocate for police reform offer specific suggestions to combat police brutality, such as body cameras, civilian review boards, improved police training, demilitarization of police forces,[19] and legislation aimed at reducing brutality (such as the Justice in Policing Act of 2020). Those who advocate to defund the police call for the full or partial diversion of funds allocated to police departments, which would be redirected toward community and social services.[20] Those who advocate to dismantle the police call for police departments to be dismantled and rebuilt from the ground up. Those who advocate to abolish police departments call for police departments to be disbanded entirely and to be replaced by other community and social services.[21][22]

  1. ^ March 18, 2015. The uncounted: why the US can't keep track of people killed by police. Archived 2019-09-11 at the Wayback Machine The Guardian.
  2. ^ Vitale, Alex S. (2017). The End of Policing. Brooklyn, NY: Verso Books. ISBN 978-1-78478-289-4.
  3. ^ Sinyangwe, Samuel (June 1, 2020). "Police Are Killing Fewer People In Big Cities, But More In Suburban And Rural America". FiveThirtyEight. Retrieved June 8, 2020.
  4. ^ "Fatal Force: 2019 police shootings database". The Washington Post. Retrieved June 8, 2020.
  5. ^ a b "Mapping Police Violence". Mapping Police Violence. Retrieved June 8, 2020.
  6. ^ "People shot to death by U.S. police, by race 2021". Statista. Retrieved October 14, 2021.
  7. ^ Sharara, Fablina; Wool, Eve E; et al. (October 2, 2021). "Fatal police violence by race and state in the USA, 1980–2019: a network meta-regression". The Lancet. 398 (10307): 1239–1255. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(21)01609-3. PMC 8485022. PMID 34600625. Across all races and states in the USA, we estimate 30 800 deaths (95% uncertainty interval [UI] 30 300–31 300) from police violence between 1980 and 2018; this represents 17 100 more deaths (16 600–17 600) than reported by the NVSS.
  8. ^ "2023 POLICE VIOLENCE REPORT". Mapping Police Violence. June 7, 2024. Retrieved June 7, 2024.
  9. ^ Wertz, Joseph; Azrael, Deborah; Berrigan, John; Barber, Catherine; Nelson, Eliot; Hemenway, David; Salhi, Carmel; Miller, Matthew (June 1, 2020). "A Typology of Civilians Shot and Killed by US Police: a Latent Class Analysis of Firearm Legal Intervention Homicide in the 2014–2015 National Violent Death Reporting System". Journal of Urban Health. 97 (3): 317–328. doi:10.1007/s11524-020-00430-0. ISSN 1468-2869. PMC 7305287. PMID 32212060.
  10. ^ Edwards, Frank; Lee, Hedwig; Esposito, Michael (August 20, 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. 116 (34): 16793–16798. Bibcode:2019PNAS..11616793E. doi:10.1073/pnas.1821204116. ISSN 0027-8424. PMC 6708348. PMID 31383756.
  11. ^ Peeples, Lynne (June 19, 2020). "What the data say about police brutality and racial bias — and which reforms might work". Nature. 583 (7814): 22–24. Bibcode:2020Natur.583...22P. doi:10.1038/d41586-020-01846-z. PMID 32601492. S2CID 220150747.
  12. ^ Levin, Sam (July 28, 2022). "'Hunted': one in three people killed by US police were fleeing, data reveals". The Guardian. Retrieved July 31, 2022.
  13. ^ Scheiber, Noam; Stockman, Farah; Goodman, J. David (June 6, 2020). "How Police Unions Became Such Powerful Opponents to Reform Efforts". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved June 10, 2020.
  14. ^ William A. Geller; Toch, Hans (1996). Police Violence: Understanding and Controlling Police Abuse of Force. Yale University Press.
  15. ^ "Police militarization fails to protect officers and targets black communities, study finds". PBS NewsHour. August 21, 2018. Retrieved June 9, 2020.
  16. ^ Lantigua-Williams, Juleyka (July 13, 2016). "How Much Can Better Training Do to Improve Policing?". The Atlantic. Retrieved June 9, 2020.
  17. ^ "Why So Many Police Are Handling the Protests Wrong". The Marshall Project. June 1, 2020. Retrieved June 9, 2020.
  18. ^ Andrew Chung; Lawrence Hurley; Jackie Botts; Andrea Januta; Guillermo Gomez (May 30, 2020). "Special Report: For cops who kill, special Supreme Court protection". Reuters. Archived from the original on June 12, 2020. Retrieved June 2, 2020.
  19. ^ "Solutions". Campaign Zero. Retrieved June 9, 2020.
  20. ^ Searcey, Dionne (June 8, 2020). "What Would Efforts to Defund or Disband Police Departments Really Mean?". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved June 10, 2020.
  21. ^ Andrew, Scottie (June 7, 2020). "There's a growing call to defund the police. Here's what it means". CNN. Retrieved June 9, 2020.
  22. ^ "Calls to reform, defund, dismantle and abolish the police, explained". NBC News. June 10, 2020. Retrieved June 10, 2020.