Police brutality is a major problem in the United States. Overuse of force has rocked many communities to this point, with protests breaking out around the country from Missouri to New York City to Charlotte and many places in-between. In fact, an entire movement has popped up around stopping overuse of force. “Black Lives Matter,” as it has been called, is a movement to stress the fact that police brutality and other bad policing tends to come down the hardest on the heads of black people in America.
This movement has pointed out that quick triggers and innate fear help to drive police officers to do things to black people they would not do otherwise. It has led the public to see how difficult it is to even get an arrest on a police officer that kills a man and how difficult it can be to get a conviction in the rare case an arrest has been made. More than that, the movement has pointed out that there are certain structural, institutional problems in American policing that go well beyond one or two bad apples. In fact, problems in policing are so prevalent that there must be a full excising of the issue if things are going to get better in the future.
In order to help improve the existing situation, three different things are needed, each with a different sub-layer involved. For one, there needs to be better accountability, which will come through things like body cameras and more effective grand jury policies. There must also be better training, which comes through racial bias training and more awareness of the role those things play. On top of that, a commitment to more involvement and engagement with the local community is necessary. Community policing is a major step in the right direction that should be forthcoming.
One of the issues currently is the lack of accountability in policing. Because of the so-called “thin blue line” of support, police officers often do not face consequences for their actions. If they commit an act of brutality, it is often true that their friends will cover for them, and it can be a challenge for citizens to prove that something went awry. One of the ways to fix this is to have body cameras installed on every police officer in America (White, 2014). They should run continuously, with audio, and should be uploaded to a cloud that the police department cannot control (Taylor, 2016). This would help to ensure that the truth could come out. Beyond that, the existing grand jury system makes it difficult to hold police officers accountable. Often, those systems put people onto grand juries that have clear biases in favor of police officers. Also of note are systems that allow grand jurors to do simulations that allow them to better understand officers. These bias the jurors and make it hard to get an indictment.
In addition to transparency, there needs to be better training of police officers. Some have mentioned better training in terms of the rules of engagement, but this does not go far enough. Instead, the important thing to do is to focus on racial sensitivity training and racial bias training. There are tools that currently exist that can allow people to understand their own racial biases more so they will be more active thinkers on race (James et al, 2014). One of the issues for officers is that they operate with implicit biases that they might not even realize. Perhaps they perceive more danger from black men than they do from other types of people. Perhaps they think that larger black men are more capable of doing things that other human beings cannot. If these biases are implicit and not out in the open, officers will never be able to make more progress in treating people in a fair way.
Community policing is another element that should be considered. Currently many police officers live outside of the places they police. They live in the suburbs and do not have a good relationship with the people in their communities (Cordner, 2014). They do not understand the mental illnesses that people have or some of the concerns of parents. By doing more community policing and allowing police officers to develop real bonds in the communities they serve, it will be possible for these officers to treat people more like human beings and less like the threats they currently see. If the existing problem is that officers refuse or are incapable of seeing the humanity in citizens, then one of the solutions must be to make officers go into those communities and build relationships of all kinds—with business owners, kids, teachers, and faith leaders—that will make them more effective at their jobs in the future.
Fixing racial bias and overuse of force in policing is not simple. The problems have roots that go back hundreds of years in some cases. The racial bias element operates silently, under the surface, in such a way that individuals often do not even know about the ideas they hold and act on. To fix these things, a multi-prong approach must be utilized. Police departments and sheriff’s offices must begin to seek accountability, first through body cameras but also through better grand jury policies. In addition, they should undergo racial bias training so these things get out in the open rather than festering. Lastly, an approach toward community policing might be helpful for allowing officers to see the people they police in a more human light.
