Police brutality or police violence is legally defined as a civil rights violation where officers exercise undue or excessive force against a subject. This includes, but is not limited to, physical or verbal harassment, physical or mental injury, property damage, and death. In some countries, "the color of law" protects officers from ambiguous situations.
In the United States, it is common for marginalized groups to perceive the police as oppressors, rather than protectors or enforcers of the law, due to the statistically disproportionate number of minority incarcerations.[5] Hubert Locke wrote: When used in print or as the battle cry in a black power rally, police brutality can by implication cover a number of practices, from calling a citizen by his or her first name to death by a policeman's bullet. What the average citizen thinks of when he hears the term, however, is something midway between these two occurrences, something more akin to what the police profession knows as "alley court"—the wanton vicious beating of a person in custody, usually while handcuffed, and usually taking place somewhere between the scene of the arrest and the station house.[6] In March 1991, members of the Los Angeles Police Department attacked an African American suspect, Rodney King, while a white civilian videotaped the incident. This incident led to extensive media coverage and criminal charges against several of the officers involved. In April 1992, hours after the four police officers involved were acquitted at trial, the Los Angeles riots of 1992 commenced and resulted in 53 deaths, 2,383 injuries, more than 7,000 fires, damage to 3,100 businesses, and nearly $1 billion in financial losses. After facing a federal trial, two of the four officers were convicted and received 32-month prison sentences. The case was widely seen as a key factor in the reform of the Los Angeles Police Department. Data released by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (2011) showed that from 2003 to 2009 at least 4,813 people died while being arrested by local police. Of the deaths classified as law enforcement homicides, there were 2,876 deaths; of those, 1,643 or of the deaths were "people of color".
Size: 4498px × 3849px
Photo credit: © American Photo Archive / Alamy / Afripics
License: Royalty Free
Model Released: No
Keywords: african, american, beat, beating, billy, black, blue, brutality, city, civil, club, disturbance, enforce, enforcement, equal, equality, hate, hatred, integration, minority, negro, nightstick, police, policing, poor, race, racial, racist, riot, segregation, street, underclass, uniform, urban
