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Police Brutality

Are they our savior or are they our Worst Nightmare? Based on statistics half of you will
believe that Police Brutality is a real problem in this community. One third of the other half are
leaning side to side and the rest are just not convinced that there is such a thing. Police brutality
has been around since the early 1800s. Although as long as Police brutality has been around it
hasn't really surfaced the earths face until recent years including 2014. The fact of the matter at
hand is that the Police Force of America are abusing their power.(Porter)
Ironically according to the information provided by the police (Porter) , the American
Police Force is trained in multiple ways of self defense placing lethal weapon use gun at the
bottom of the list. The police force even have specially trained K9 units that are trained to pin a
suspect or make them drop and surrender to the armed forces. The American Police Force is
equipped with pepper spray, tasers, teargas, rubber bullets, handgun, and batons. Even with all of
these at their disposal the average officer will grab their handgun before all other things
considered. The handgun being the officers last means of protection is the most lethal of all
weapons that he/she is able to carry(. It is also the number one weapon used in deaths by an
officer. It only takes one shot to wound, stop, or even kill a person.
Officers are killing more and more people. According to Eugene Robinson, an opinion
writer in the NY Times Newspaper, there are over 1,000 deaths of innocent people each year by
an armed officer. The number increases but since the police departments do not go straight to the
FBI with data on the real number of people being killed by the law enforcement, its hard to find
out how many people are being killed every year. So why are not they showing the numbers of

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people killed by the police? I am sure we all know that a robbery of any kind happens every 15
seconds.
Well what people did not know is that every 28 hours a black man or boy is killed by
police enforcement (washington). Most of which that are being killed are unarmed. The world
we live in now stands as it is labeled, crazy. Now-a-days people don't know if the next traffic
stop could be your last. Why are we not able to find out the number of loved ones and others
being killed without the killer being accused? Some might say because the government is
holding out on a crazy conspiracy plan against their sworn nation. Well those select few might be
right seeing that the government does not show their true faces and colors.
Although its a conspiracy the government will go through great lengths to protect their
fellow companions. They are so secretive they won't even let the president near their ironically
top secret base in the middle of nowhere. When was the last time people seen or heard about
Barack Obama going into Area 51? The fact that we do not know what goes on in that
supposedly secret base is the same about how we do not know what our death by an armed law
enforcement toll is. What we do know is that in the whole year of 2001 the death toll by an
armed force officer was a lot smaller than the death toll by an armed force officer in 1 month of
the year of 2014.
People are stopped for traffic violations everyday, 3 out of every 8 traffic stops result in
unnecessary conflict. Some of which is extremely exaggerated. From a personal level on behalf
of the people who are abused by the police force. On September 25, 2014 a 51 year old woman
was beaten on the side of a highway an officer. The incident took place on a California highway
and was caught on camera. Marlene Pinnock, is a 51 year old grandmother who was walking a

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highway when a highway patrol officer ,Daniel Andrew, ran up behind her and threw her to the
ground (Mazza).
He then repeatedly struck her with a closed fist to the head and upper body. In the officers
defense he states, she was resisting arrest. If there had not been a video this man would still be
an officer ready to beat another. The video shows Pinnock, attempting to walk away from the
officer. The woman is 51 years old and wasnt in the wrong of any crime. Andrew responded to a
call about a black woman walking the side of a highway barefoot. His job was to check on the
woman, not beat her.
Nearly two times a week in the United States, a police officer has killed a person during
a seven-year period ending in 2012, according to the most recent accounts of justifiable homicide
reported to the FBI. (Heath). With statistics like this there would be more bodies to bury than
graves to dig.
Officers rely on their lethal weapons much more than they need to. A homeless man was
shot to death for Illegally Camping in the foothills of New Mexico. During a news conference,
Chief Eden said the shooting was justified because Boyd was a "direct threat" to the three gunwielding officers. Eden reportedly left the press conference before news stations could ask why
officers didn't use stun guns instead of firing their weapons. Three gun wielding officers, and a
k9 unit, apparently didnt scare him and a stun gun was out the question, so they shot Boyd.
(Murdock, Sebastian).
In May, after their Wisconsin home had burned down, the Phonesavanh family was
staying with relatives in Georgia. One night, a SWAT team with assault rifles invaded the home
and threw a flash-bang grenade despite the presence of kid toys in the front yard. The police
were looking for the fathers nephew on drug charges. He wasnt there, but a 19-month-old

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named Bou Bou was. The military type flash-bang grenade landed in his crib. Bou Bou was
wounded in the chest and had third-degree burns. He was put in a medically induced
coma.(Kane, Alex).
As the case of Wilson shows, the police busting down doors care little about whether
theres a child in the home. Another case profiled by the ACLU shows how children can be
caught in the crossfire with some really crazy consequences. Police do a drug raid and hurt
innocent child during it. These kind of things have a huge impact on families and others that are
innocent. A surprise raid can kill or seriously injure somebody. Even though some people believe
The Officers of America are just doing their job, the police of America abuse their power.
Because of the high number of officers who rely on their weapons/guns more than they
need to. Study shows that in the Obama era police departments. have received, tens of thousands
of machine guns, 200,000 ammunition clips, hundreds of silencers, thousands of camo pieces,
armored cars and aircrafts. Departments from around the US are receiving the very same thing
that is killing everybody in the world. (Moyers). Even The Most Untrustworthy US Police
Departments Receive Military Weapons. Study shows a pentagon program that distributes
military surplus gear to local law enforcement allows even departments that the Justice
Department has censured for civil rights violations to apply for and get lethal weaponry. The
Pentagon, which provides the free surplus military equipment, says its consultation with the
Justice Department will be looked at as the government reviews how to prevent high-powered
weaponry from flowing to the untrustworthy.
But the same people they are giving the weapons to are the same ones that can't be
trusted. The Justice Department has opened civil rights investigations into the practices of some
20 police departments in the past five years, with the Ferguson force the latest. The

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investigations sometimes end in negotiated settlements known as consent decrees that mandate
reforms. Yet being flagged as problematic by Washington does not bar a police department from
participating in the program. (Abdollah). These are millions of dollars worth of military gear
that is being distributed to local police forces on an annual basis, and these regular exchanges are
occurring from coast to coast in towns and cities that are hardly considered the epicenters of
violent crime. Let alone on the path of being there. This is america why are there hand me down
machine guns, armored cars, and other military hardware protecting the United States of
America?
Ferguson isn't the only place loading up with military work. Police departments from
New Jersey to Arizona have loaded up in recent years with thousands of military assault rifles,
hundreds of armored combat vehicles that saw duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, and more than 600
aircraftand no one is quite sure how any of that equipment is used. To date, the review said
approximately 460,000 pieces of controlled military property is in the hands of police,
including 92,442 small arms, 44,275 night vision devices, 5,235 high mobility wheeled trucks,
617 armored combat vehicles, and 616 aircraft. (Ted Sherman).
Weighing in at 30 tons and built to withstand land mines, the armored combat vehicle is
one of hundreds showing up across the country, in police departments big and small. The 9-foottall armored truck was intended for an overseas battlefield. But as President Obama ushers in the
end of what he called Americas long season of war, the former tools of combat M-16 rifles,
grenade launchers, silencers and more are ending up in local police departments, often with little
public notice. During the Obama administration, according to Pentagon data, police departments
have received tens of thousands of machine guns; nearly 200,000 ammunition magazines;

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thousands of pieces of camouflage and night-vision equipment; and hundreds of silencers,

armored cars and aircraft.
The equipment has been added to the armories of police departments that already look
and act like military units. Police SWAT teams are now deployed tens of thousands of times each
year, increasingly for routine jobs. Masked, heavily armed police officers in Louisiana raided a
nightclub in 2006 as part of a liquor inspection. In Florida in 2010, officers in SWAT gear and
with guns drawn carried out raids on barbershops that mostly led only to charges of barbering
without a license.(Jacob Langston)
A quiet city of about 25,000 people, Neenah has a violent crime rate that is far below the
national average. Neenah has not had a homicide in more than five years. Somebody has to be
the first person to say Why are we doing this? said William Pollnow Jr., a Neenah city
councilman who opposed getting the new police truck. Neenahs police chief, Kevin E.
Wilkinson, said he understood the concern. At first, he thought the anti-mine truck was too big.
But the departments old armored car could not withstand high-powered gunfire, he said. I dont
like it. I wish it were the way it was when I was a kid, he said. But he said the possibility of
violence, however remote, required taking precautions. Were not going to go out there as
Officer Friendly with no body armor and just a handgun and say Good enough.(Department of
Defense)
Based on the graph below ranging from 1968 to 2012, death by officers have dropped in
the late 70s but have been gradually increasing. Who is to say what we have in 2014.

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"When an officer meets resistance from a suspect, that officer is legally authorized to
escalate the level of force employed, depending on the resistance received from the suspect." In
addition, officers are taught to control their emotions in volatile confrontations and to utilize
force only as needed. "The very nature of their position at the front-line means they often find
themselves in the most violent of situations. Such dangerous situations rely on instinct and even
self-defense to keep situations from getting out of hand."Although police would ideally use the
minimum amount of force to subdue a criminal or a crowd without excessively endangering
themselves or bystanders, it can be very difficult to judge the risks posed by an assailant in a
split-second. Police officers are finding themselves in life threatening situations with criminals.

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During these situations the officers have to use excessive measures to control the situation.
Excessive force should be allow for the safety of the officers lives. Many officers come to a
scene and dont know what is going on. When approaching a scene they try to measure the
danger level before entering to call extra officers to help. But when an officer cannot measure the
scene is when problems occur"(GOOGLE)
In Conclusion weve seen scene after scene of police beating the crap out of, and even
shooting and killing unarmed or minimally dangerous students, women, old men and crazy
people, many of them after they have been handcuffed and checked for weapons. The police
brass, and leading politicians who oversee the departments involved, nearly always have the
same answer: This is not the norm, these are isolated incidents, police violence is not on the rise.
Rarely is an abusive or murderous officer punished or even administratively disciplined for
documented crimes. The thing is, of course, it is on the rise. Just as the exonerations of supposed
murders and rapists are only those where there was DNA available to prove their innocence,
while many more are also clearly wrongly facing death or long prison sentences, the scenes of
brutality were seeing on the videos are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg too. What is
different is that were seeing these things at all. It used to be that getting videos of police
brutality was very rare like the taping of the notorious police assault on the prone body of
Rodney King by Los Angeles cops during a traffic stop. It just happened that someone with a
video camera was at the scene when it occurred. Nowadays everyone with a cellphone is a
potential videographer, so were seeing more of what really goes on when police make their
arrests.

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Works Cited
Apuzzo, Matt. "War Gear Flows to Police Departments." The New York Times. The New York
Times, 08 June 2014. Web. 07 Jan. 2015.
"Assault Weapons Policy Summary." Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence RSS. Web. 09 Jan.
2015.
Bach, Natasha. "Police Violence Has Been Going On Forever. No Wonder People Are Fed Up
With It." The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 23 Aug. 2014. Web. 09 Oct. 2014.
"Cop Filmed Hitting Man Who Questioned Car Search [VIDEO]." The Daily Caller. Web. 10
Nov. 2014.
"Counter Arguments and Solutions." Anti- Police Brutality. Web. 08 Jan. 2015.
Kane, Alex. "Not Just Ferguson." BillMoyers.com. Mutual of America, 13 Oct. 2014. Web. 13
Oct. 2014.

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Murdock, Sebastian. "Police Shoot Homeless Man During Camping Arrest (GRAPHIC
VIDEO)." The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 24 Mar. 2014. Web. 21 Oct.
2014.
"Offensive Weapons: Import Controls." - Detailed Guidance. Web. 09 Jan. 2015.
"One Third of Americans Believe Police Brutality Exists in Their Area." One Third of Americans
Believe Police Brutality Exists in Their Area. Web. 21 Nov. 2014.
"Police Brutality, Misconduct and Shootings." Police Brutality, Misconduct and Shooting. Web.
09 Nov. 2014.
Ted Sherman | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com. "Report Finds Flood of Military Weapons into
Police Arsenals Needs Better Oversight." Web. 09 Jan. 2015