Ryan Houston

English 1301
10/24/2017

Does Police Brutality Exist?

In an essay written by Walter Williams, Blacks Vs Police, the author makes a

point that police brutality does not exist as a pressing issue, and that it does not exist

right now, that the only violent crimes blacks suffer are black on black violence, and

uses Chicagos gun related deaths to prove his point. I disagree with this and believe

that police brutality is a huge issue not just in Chicago but throughout the nation as a

whole, police when caught committing a severe crime tend to not be punished, every

day the media publishes stories and videos of police brutality, and in my own personal

life I have witnessed and experienced officers using their power negatively.

There have been several instances in the past thirty years that involved police

officers beating or killing an innocent civilian in which the officer or officers involved

were either not punished or very lightly punished for the crime committed. This allows

people who become police officers to see no real punishment in doing what they please,

including abusing the power given to them to be virtually impenetrable by the law.

Pbs.org said, Since 2005, 82 U.S. law enforcement officers have been charged with

murder or manslaughter for on-duty shootings, according to Bowling Green State

University criminologist Philip Stinson. So far, 29 have been convicted, five of them for

murder. This is outrageous, this amount of unwarranted shootings without

consequence is a prominent issue today, and there is nothing the people can do to

change what is said in the jury, so it leaves victims of these crimes to believe that they

have no rights and that their basic rights can be overrun at any time by an officer that
chooses to do so. So often we hear the conversation that its about bad apples and bad

actors, but, at the end of the day, if this were just about individuals, we wouldnt see less

than 1 percent of convictions in all police shootings. Of the 1,155 people who were killed

by police in 2016, there were only 13 charges brought, and so far we have seen no

convictions. So at the end of the day, its not an individual issue with officers that

citizens have to deal with, but a systematic corruption that has allowed these cases to

be skewed.

It seems recently that you can only go a few weeks without hearing of another

police shooting that has occurred, with the modern day introduction of camera phones

and livestreaming, people have caught officers committing crimes on personal cameras

to catch things that would have never been recorded in the past, starting with the

incident of Rodney King in 1991, where a man with a camera video taped a group of

cops senselessly beating an unarmed innocent man. News companies also thrive off of

these sort of stories, because the worse story a media platform has the more views they

attract, so news companies have people everywhere trying to find film and evidence of

police crimes. What we see on the news today however, is still just what happens to be

caught on camera, officers for a long time have abused their authority and done things

that they would not have done if they knew they could be caught, not everyone has a

livestream up and ready for when an officer decides to abuse his power. Acquittals,

non-indictments and long waits: These outcomes are realities for a near-countless

number of families who have lost loved ones to questionable and excessive uses of

force by police in recent years. The more that people start protecting themselves by
videotaping their interactions with officers, the less chance these officers have of being

acquitted of committed crimes.

Police brutality not only happens to occur in the lives of African Americans, but

has been an issue in my own life as well. When I was 8 years old I watched an officer

use a baton to subdue my father and held him tso that his face slammed into the hood

of the police car on the side of a highway while the other office inspected what was

presumed a handgun as my toy water gun, the officers, after finding out it was a water

gun, pretty much just left and gave my dad a speeding warning. This would have been

brought to court if it were not for my dad's past and his wish to not be involved with the

police at all. I myself have had a gun pulled on me by an officer because I held an

airsoft gun in my hand, and after proving it was a toy, was forced to ride in the back of

the car to my house. In 2015, I was invited to a pool party for a friend of mines birthday,

most of the kids there were African American. The neighborhood consist of a lot of very

conservative racist white people, one of which got in a fight with a girl at the party and

called the police on the pool party, police showed up and told everyone to leave. The

girl who threw the party was very defiant and verbally aggressive towards the officers, in

turn she was grabbed by the back of the hair by one of the officers and had her head

slammed into the ground, the officer proceeded to sit on top of her to subdue her, then

two of my friends tried to go to her to get her moms number so that they could call her

mom, and the officer pulled a gun on the two kids. Incidents like that have caused me to

hate and fear the police and is much of the reason why I would almost never call 911 in

the first place.

 An argument a lot of people make is that police dont harm nearly as many

African Americans as they do to each other, and this is actually true. Thousands of

people die every year in major cities due to black on black violence, most of which

murders are not even solved. People say that the media focuses on cop vs black

violence because it boosts political and media numbers, and that there is not nearly

enough focus on the lives that are lost every day by citizen murders.

However, police brutality is a very prominent and real issue in the United States

right now and will continue to be so, so long as there is no real punishment for what

police officers decide to do if it is a heinous act.

 English 1301
Memo

To: Dr. Linda Carroll

From: Ryan Houston

Date: October 24, 2017

Re: Argumentative Essay Reflection

___________________________________
I enjoyed writing this essay because the topic was over something that is actually quite
personal to me, and I liked that we could create our own prompt by finding a point in the
prompt and arguing against it, this topic is an emotional topic and it also allowed me to
see different views on the subject that I had not previously looked at, and have learned
more about it because of the fact.
Yang, John M. Why Do so Few Deadly Police Shootings End in Police Convictions? PBS, Public
Broadcasting Service, 22 June 2017,
www.pbs.org/newshour/show/deadly-police-shootings-end-police-convictions.
/, Aaronlmorrison /. 14 Recent Police Brutality Cases That Show How Often Officers Aren't Held
Accountable. Mic, Mic Network Inc., 15 Sept. 2017,
mic.com/articles/184491/14-recent-police-brutality-cases-that-show-how-often-officers-arent-held-ac
countable#.BzhHws7A2.