Race Relations and Law Enforcement in the United States of America
increases incidents of grievous bodily harm and homicide.
Winter (1980) contended citing other authors and quite rightly in my view that police shooting is the greatest triggering mechanism for racial violence in this United States of America today. Making the case for the racial content in police shootings, the writer noted that studies have shown that the ratio of black victims to white victims of police shootings is as high as 30-to-1 in Milwaukee and in Chicago which has the highest rate of civilian deaths, the ratio is 6-to-1. According to the writer, the solution may be in changing the attitude of the police officers themselves. Some of the officers think that controlling their power of deadly force is handcuffing them. The problem with this way of thinking is that they appear to want uncontrolled power in dealing with blacks as opposed to whites. What is probably required is a re-orientation and some form diversity tolerance training with the hope that the police officers would use deadly force less frequently on black people
Apart from the case of Kathryn Johnston, the other victims of the deadly police shooting reviewed in this paper were unarmed and curiously ethnic minorities. The reviewed cases and others like them have given rise to negative sentiments on the part of the ethnic minorities, to wit the blacks and Latinos. There has been the attitude that Police hate blacks. The sentiment is predicated on a vast history of large and small events that African Americans face from police attitudes and actions. According to this school of thought, (Brunson, 2007), blacks do not only draw from their own experiences, but also from a consistent pattern of events they are exposed to in their communities. This perception that the police do not like black people is not helped by the aggressive policing strategies employed by the police in disadvantaged African American neighborhoods, (the hood, ghetto etc). Indirect experiences have the potential to amplify or validate individuals’ interpretations of personal experiences and merit in-depth examination Based on research finding on attitudes of African Americans towards the police, there is the contention that citizens’ distrust is more widespread among African Americans than among white folks. Brunson examines in-depth interviews of 40 African-American adolescent males who resided in a disadvantaged urban neighborhood in St. Louis to better understand their experiences with the police. A major focus of the study was to develop a “detailed understanding” of how these African-American adolescent males interpret their interactions with the police, as well as the interactions of family members, friends, and neighbors, and to assess how these experiences shape their perceptions of the police. The findings suggest that either direct or indirect mistreatment by the police led to negative evaluations by the participants. A lot of the distrust emanates from media reporting of police handling of African American cases. The cases are sensationally reported highlighting the racial contents over and above the dynamics leading to the shootings as in perceived threats and dangers encountered by the police officers involved. The case of Kathryn Johnston, the 92 year old woman shot in Atlanta by the police. She had shot into the ceiling before the officers opened fire. This is not an attempt to defend the actions of the police officers. But when a gun is fired, can it reasonably said that one would not feel endangered so as to provoke a certain reaction such as to shoot with two purposes in mind: self defense and apprehension of the suspect who is armed and dangerous? Given the background of the case which was supposed to be a drug bust, should the officers have left their guards down? I think not. There is some reason in the contention that some neighborhoods are more dangerous than others. Where a neighborhood is notorious for criminal propensity, violence and drug trafficking, the policing strategies cannot be any thing but aggressive. The various cases highlighted above only served to increase citizens’ distrust of the police among blacks in the communities where the fatalities happened. Brunson (2007) recommended that a consideration should be given to the cumulative properties of police/citizen interactions in order to fully comprehend the nature of conflicts between minority communities and police.
The Brunson view is supported by a later article titled Either they don’t know or they don’t care: black males and negative police experiences by Stewart (2007). In addition, he identified race as one of the most salient predictors of perceptions and attitudes towards the police and may be a function of neighborhood context. Owing to social limitations, imagined or real, many residents of structurally disadvantaged neighborhoods feel estranged from formal institutions; they may lack the social and/or political capital to