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Police Brutality: Uncovering the African American Impact
Origins and Tragic Incidents
Good afternoon, listeners! It is Monday, December 10th, and Today, on our podcast, we will discuss police brutality against African Americans, and I will be sharing some information about what this issue is, what makes police brutality an important issue, and its effect on our society. To begin with this topic, police brutality is when police officers put unnecessary excessive force on others. Usually, in this situation, weapons are involved, and in many cases, it unfortunately results in death.
So the obvious question is, when did police brutality against African Americans start? Well, there isn’t really a specific date or year, police brutality has really been happening for as long as people have been prejudiced against black people. Police brutality hit the spotlight when a black 12-year-old was shot and killed by a white police officer. Tamir Rice was seen with a pellet gun. The police officer had mistaken it for a real gun and killed him. The part that got civilians riled up was the fact that it was clear that the gun was fake.
Justice Denied and Social Media’s Impact
The jury still chose not to indict or charge the police officer, Timothy Loehman, with murder. It started to almost become an everyday thing where we would here yet another black teen being killed by a white police officer for unnecessary reasons. The victim would be dead, and the police officer would leave off with no consequences to face, then, we wouldn’t hear about the story again. Thanks to the wonderful generation that we live in now, many cases of police brutality have gained a lot of attention thanks to social media. Social media has helped spread and bring awareness of police brutality against african americans. It has helped bring light to the global activist group called black lives matter. This is a group that helps spread awareness of the violent acts and racism against black people. This group was formed shortly after the shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin.
Trayvon Martin’s Impact and Broader Perspective
In the summer of 2013, he was fatally shot by George Zimmerman, who claimed that he shot him because of self-defense. A fire began to go off in the citizens of Orlando, Fl, and people began to talk. They were fed up, hurt, and disgusted that this kept becoming a reoccurring act of violence in the black community. Now after dumping all this information on you guys, I know what you all are already thinking, why am I just limiting this topic to only one group of people?
Why am I just defending black people and not all people who go through police brutality? It’s not that african americans are the superior race who need to be looked at the most, it’s that we are more likely to be affected by police brutality than Caucasian people. Maggie Fox from NBC news stated that “African-Americans died at the hands of police at a rate of 7.2 per million, while whites are killed at a rate of 2.9 per million.” Now I’m not good at math, but I can clearly see the difference between those two numbers.
References:
- Rice, Tamir, a 12-year-old African American boy, was shot and killed by a white police officer, Timothy Loehmann, in Cleveland, Ohio. Reference: CNN. (2015, June 11). Tamir Rice shooting: No charges for officers. https://www.cnn.com/2015/12/28/us/tamir-rice-shooting/
- Formation of the Black Lives Matter movement after the shooting of Trayvon Martin. Reference: Garza, A. (2016). From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation. Haymarket Books.
- Shooting of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman in 2013. Reference: Smith, M. (2012, July 13). Trayvon Martin, Unarmed Teen, Shot And Killed By Neighborhood Watch Member George Zimmerman In Florida. HuffPost. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trayvon-martin-shooting-george-zimmerman_n_1359663
- Statistics regarding police brutality and its impact on different racial groups. Reference: Fox, M. (2015, April 7). The Data Is in: Police Disproportionately Killed Black People in 2015. NBC News. https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/panama-papers/data-police-disproportionately-killed-black-people-2015-n549856
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