Race Relations and Law Enforcement in the United States of America

engage law enforcement in order to address various problems within their neighborhood. Often, the police may view these structurally depressed neighborhoods as crime-prone ecological units.

Some instances of police shootings tend to be indefensible. While people are prepared to accept a single officer may resort to deadly shooting based on his judgment, the people resent the use of deadly force by multiple officers involved in the shooting. This suggestion is validated by the outcry which followed the shooting of a 92 year old woman (Kathryn Johnston) in Atlanta by more than four officers under the guise of the belief that the woman was a drug trafficker. What made it worse was the discovery later that there was an attempt to cover up the events leading up to the shooting of the black woman. Curiously enough, it was another racially tainted police fatality. The position of the police officers is that they need to defend themselves against perceived dangers from the suspects and that any attempt to control their use of deadly force is a way of handcuffing them and making them defenseless. For the citizens, particularly the black population, the use of deadly force is not justifiable in most circumstances and is viewed as excessive in most cases. In the article under reference, two separate studies were conducted to investigate perceptions of Police use or misuse of deadly force. The first study found that as number of officers decreased and number of shots increased, perceptions of misuse of force were augmented. Number of shots per officer significantly predicted perceptions of misuse of force.  The second study showed a significant interaction between number of officers, number of shots fired, and social dominance orientation. This personality variable was an especially strong predictor of misuse of force in situations involving the largest number of shots fired per officer. This finding is in consonance with the racial element inherent the deadly shootings of the police. One way of testing the validity of the racial sentiment would have been to examine the rate of deadly shootings among black police officers and to see who were shot in terms of racial composition, (Perkins & Bourgeois, 2006).

The issue of police shootings took a different dimension with the suggestion that particular races are being targeted for such fatal assaults. Unfortunately, several studies seem to support the racial undertone in the shootings, according to Tennebaum (1994). Prior to the Garner case, police shooting was governed by one of four legal excuses for shooting a suspect. They are The Any-Felony Rule; the Defense-of Life Rule; The Model Penal Code; The Forcible Felony Rule. The any felony rule excused a police officer who shot at a suspect getting away running away after committing a felony. The problem with virtually all of the four rules was them they called for a judgment on the part of the officer even before the suspect has a day in court. In the Garner case, Garner brought an action against the police officer and the police department for fatally shooting his son while leaving the scene of a burglary. The suspect was unarmed. The court ruled that such shooting may not be used unless it is to prevent the escape and the officer has probable cause to believe that the suspect poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others. 

There is a variant of deadly police shooting which cannot be blamed on the police because it is induced by the victims themselves. Victim induced shooting has been defined in several ways and Mckenzie considered some of the definitions describing them as confusing: killing in which the victim is the precipitator of the killing, incidents in which people bent on self destruction engage in life threatening and criminal activities to force the police to shoot them. All the definitions considered indicate a conscious act on the part of the victim. But the writer points out that not all shooting inducing act are conscious.  In this area of police shooting, race does not appear to be a factor.

On the side of the police, it must be stated that there are confusing terminologies in the race discussion. Minorities can be contextual. Blacks may be minorities in the United States of America as a whole. But not so in some communities that are predominantly black. For example, in most metropolitan Atlanta in the state of Georgia, it would be incorrect to refer to blacks as the minority because they are in majority. The fact of the racial composition of the community is significant because of claims of racial profiling. Where three of four citizens are blacks, it follows that blacks are going to form majority of those apprehended by the police in that community. It is quite possible, for example, to have all the people pulled over in a routine police check to be black because not very many whites are present in the

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