Throughout the years, the issue of police brutality against black communities has been a major problem affecting many countries in the United States. Unjustified killings have taken place in the black community, which has clearly led to a national outcry for justice and equality. The issue has become particularly notable in recent years thanks to the numerous murders of young black people that have been committed by police officers. Research shows that young black men were nine times more likely to be murdered by police than other Americans in 2015, with a total death toll 1,134 at the hands of law enforcement authorities ( Swaine et.al., 2015). In today’s society, social inequality has become worse with all the cases of horrible acts, and I believe that there needs to be a change in the way our justice system addresses and handles such situations.
Brutality in the police is not a new phenomenon. More than a dozen police departments in major cities across the United States have investigated allegations of racial discrimination or police brutality in the Department of Justice ( DOJ) Office of Civil Rights (OCR) (Gabbidon and Greene 2013). The black community was deprived of the fact that black lives does not matter. Society needs a proper reality check we need to have a clear understanding of the definition of Community policy, responsibility, accountability, and commitments. The federal government must deal with police brutality because it inaugurates a deeply-rooted structural complication that has caused indescribable amounts of sorrow and rage, as those in command have been overlooked for way too long and demands to act before more lives are lost.
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Black communities fear for their lives every day and if law enforcement does not take responsibility for injustice, a nation that demands freedom, fairness, and serenity will never have true justice and serenity. In my essay, I will be providing examples of police brutality against black communities and how police brutality affects the health of the people subjected to this sort of torture. As well as, the methods of solving this serious problem with efficiency of the police. Therefore, it demonstrates not only the systematic problem that the police have with the use of deadly force, but also the implicit racial bias that the system continues to perpetuate as people of color are the victims.
Standard operating procedures have played an important role in incidents of police brutality, as they are almost always referred to as the main reason why officers should not be sentenced because they “act” or “obey” according to the law. But Theresa A, the author of the Racial Profiling Symposium. Martinez believes this was only a racial profiling excuse. Race profiling can be defined in different ways in Martinez’s article the use of race as a key factor in police decision-making to stop and interrogate citizens, the use of race as a criterion in the decision-making process during discretionary traffic and field interrogation and race profiling is a crime-fighting strategy a government policy that treats African Americans, Latinos and members of other minority groups as criminal suspects, assuming that catching criminals increases the chances of doing so.”” (Martinez, 2004). I have therefore provided incidents that illustrate precisely why this problem needs to be brought to light in order to prevent further injury or death. These incidents demonstrate a clear disparity between racial profiling and public safety because too many victims have been claimed in cases where police officers only comply with their instructions.
On 16 July 2009, a professor at Harvard University, Henry Louis Gates, had some difficulty getting into his home (the front door of the house was closed), so he had to force the door open, but an elderly woman caught him in action as a break- in ( Wilkes, 2010). Gates was arrested by the Sgt. James P. Crowley, a Cambridge police officer, on the front porch of his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts (Wilkes, 2010). Gates’ police mugs and a photograph of him in handcuffs on his porch, surrounded by armed police officers, have become viral, and a message has been sent to the black community that the police can do whatever they want (Wilkes, 2010). Because of this story, people realized that until today there had been racial profiling against black people. Blacks deal with excessive strength, abuse and persecution when unnecessary due to their skin color ( Carboda, 2016).
On 1 January 2009, a group of young men returning from New Year’s revelry were pulled out of a train car by Bay Area Rapid Transit ( BART) police officers at a crowded Oakland, California subway station (McLaughlin et al. 2009). The officers handcuffed most of the young men in response to reports of alleged altercation (McLaughlin et al. 2009). In the resulting confusion, Grant was seized and pressed face down on the platform, where officer Johannes Mehserle stood above Grant and shot a single shot at his back (McLaughlin et al., 2009). The ballot pulled off the solid platform and punctured Grant’s lung seven hours later ( McLaughlin et al., 2009). The event was recorded by passengers on the train with their cell phones ( Stannard and Bulwa, 2009) and in a few days, multiple videos of the incident were uploaded to the Internet from different angles. The incident sparked widespread protests and riots among Oakland residents, leading to comparisons with a black motorist, Rodney King, who was also captured on camera in 1991 ( Egelko, 2009).
In addition, historical evidence of the public presence of black bodies by the police dates at least to the era of slavery, when the police controlled blacks and captured those escaping enslavement (Alang et.al., 2017). Blacks were viciously abused in most cases causing to either extreme injuries or death (Alang et.al., 2017). However, as others have said, brutality is greater than physical strength; emotional and sexual violence, verbal assault and psychological intimidation are involved (Alang et.al., 2017). The author argues in the article Police Brutality and Black Health that police brutality is a social determinant of health and that, today, little experiential work has linked police brutality to poor health among people who have been disproportionately involved in brutality (Alang et.al., 2017). In 2005, Dondi Johnson was arrested for public urination in Baltimore, Maryland and put in a police vehicle. Mr. Johnson entered the police vehicle in good health and left a quadriplegic vehicle and later died of vehicle injuries (Alang et al., 2017). Videos such as Eric Garner’s saying, “”I can’t breathe”” 11 times until he lost consciousness or Diamond Reynolds (Philando Castile ‘s girlfriend who was murdered by police in Falcon Heights, MN, 2016) told the police officer, “”You shot him with four bullets, sir. He was only licensed and registered, sir. ( Alang et.al., 2017). All these events demonstrate intelligibly that police brutality has a major impact on the health of blacks.
These are, after many studies, the intersection of police brutality mechanisms linked to excessive morbidity among blacks; (1) fatal injuries that increase population-specific mortality rates death is not immediate for some victims of police brutality, but results from repeated physical injury while in police custody ( Alang et.al., 2017). (2) Adverse physiological reactions that increase morbidity witnessing or encountering harassment, routine unjustified inspections and unpunished deaths send a message to the black community that their bodies are police property, disposable and undeserving of equity and dignity. (Chaney et.al., 2013). (3) Racist public relations that cause stress or anxiety arguing that victims were somehow responsible for their own premature murders ( dissecting the murdered people’s guilt or innocence versus understanding how White supremacy might have caused it) (Alang et.al., 2017). (4) Arrests, imprisonment and legal, medical and funeral bills that cause financial strain loss of jobs after imprisonment, brutality survivors may have to deal with disabilities resulting from the excessive use of force by the police (Alang et.al., 2017). In other words, disability decreases efficiency and the ability to build up financial resources. Financial strain and poverty affect black health by restricting access to healthy food, exposing families to environmental risks and poor housing conditions and making access to health services more difficult (Szanton et.al., 2010). Finally, (5) desegregated brutal structures leading to structured decommissioning unrestricted police forces and insufficient prosecution of perpetrators could give rise to a sense of impotence in the black community, reducing the recognition of gains made by movements of civil rights ( Alang et.al., 2017).
Despite all of that, there are certainly ways to prevent this problem and police efficiency, such as community policing, from what I have read, and to reduce the inherent fear of blacks by hiring more people of color who know the communities in which they work can alleviate the problem of police harassment or misbehavior ( Gee, 2004).(1) Increase the choice and diversity of the Police Commission by extending the Commission from five to seven members and dividing the appointment authority between the Mayor and the Board of Supervisors (Gee, 2004). (2) To increase the independence of the Police Commission by staggering the terms of the Commissioners and preventing their removal without the consent of the supervisors ( Gee, 2004). (3) Making visible that the Office of Citizen Complaints must have permission to manage its investigations with all necessary records and finally, (4) enabling the Citizen Complaints Offie to transmit cases to the Police Commission immediately, prohibiting cases from being disregarded (Gee, 2004). Hence, I believe that if all of these are taken into action, the rate of death in police brutality for the black community will decrease.
Comparing Chris McCandless, Everett Ruess And Jon Krakauer
Many people decide to live their lives alone. Though, only a few choose to live in the wild. In the book, Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer vividly depicts the adventuresome trek Chris McCandless left. From the friends and colleagues he made to the hardships he went through, McCandless is defined as a warm, sociable and friendly person despite the fact that he was a traveler. Other than McCandless, there are even more people that have decided the risks to live in the wild such as, Jon Krakauer and Everett Ruess. All three of them had both connections and divergences among their own qualities as a person and their journey.
All three adventurers displayed their love for the wild through how they lived each day today after, leaving society behind. Later arriving in Fairbanks, Alaska, McCandless set up his camp and began to live off the wildlife nearby. In his journal, he noted that he caught each day and showed his gratefulness through his writing font. He believed that it [wildlife] was morally indefensible to waste any part of an animal that has been dispatched for food (166). He tried his best to preserve the animals he hunted for food, which in turn displayed his thoughts of nature as something precious.
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Similarities Between Chris McCandless and Jon Krakauer
Krakauer also loved what nature had in store for his yearning for interesting natural events, In his childhood, he devoted most of his conscious hours to fantasizing about the wild, and then undertaking, ascents of remote mounts in Alaska and Canada (134). Shown by the time he spent dreaming, people can infer him as a person who deeply appreciates nature. At the age of eighteen, Ruess dreamed of living in the wastelands for the sake of enchantment, He wandered to find events that could surprise him until his near-death, in which he decided to find the more desolate place to die at:
And what beautiful country I have witnessed — wild, tremendous wasteland arrays, lost mesas, blue mountains rearing upward from the vermillion sands of the desert canyons five feet wide at the bottom and hundreds of feet deep, cloudbursts roaring down unnamed canyons, and hundreds of houses of the cliff dwellers, abandoned a thousand years ago. (92)
Inscribed from Ruess’s journal entry, he is shown to cherish nature by the descriptions he uses such as vermillion sands also by his powerful use of verbs, like roaring, to describe scenery he witnesses while traveling.
As a result of starting their trek, all three completely disregarded their parents’ final thoughts and expectations for them. After dropping out of college, McCandless refused to inform his parents of his location; instead, he chose to request the post office to return all letters back. A friend that McCandless met during his journey, Stuckey, begged and pleaded with him to call his parents, after discovering that he did not tell his parents where he was (160). Krakauer disappointed his father by the road he chose to take in his early youth. He spent his early youth doing something that he pursued with a zeal bordering on obsession, and that something was mountain climbing (134). Ruess did not directly disregard his parents’ expectations for him; however, he indirectly did so by constantly traveling which did not allow his parents to know what occurred during most of his teenage life. Before traveling he dropped out [of UCLA] after a single semester, to his father’s lasting dismay, spent time with his parents for two extended visits, and stayed in San Francisco during the winter (90).
Since their early childhoods, these three men were shown to be very engaged in their academics and enjoyed literature. According to Krakauer, McCandless’s half-full backpack was his library: nine or ten paperbound books (162). He carried books that he thought he would enjoy reading. Furthermore, he also based his pseudonym, Alex Supertramp, on a book called The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp. From his youth until now, Krakauer has been interested in literature; he wrote books such as Into Thin Air and Into the Wild that has made it to The New York Times Best Seller List. Through his travels, Ruess wrote different types of literature, especially poetry. Ruess was considered a gifted painter, printmaker, and a natural poet.
Differences Between Chris McCandless and Everett Ruess
Understanding that the wilderness can be extremely rough, people can understand that there is only a small chance of coming out alive after a long period of time of living there. McCandless and Ruess are examples of these cases; though, Krakauer survived to recount his tale. McCandless suffered from starvation and natural disasters. He indicated all his efforts in his journal entries: he’d written, 4th-day famine in his journal (164). After his futile attempt of leaving, he turned around back toward the bus and died shortly (171). Although Ruess’s death was never verified, debates rotated around the incident. Bewildering stories of his death included death while scrambling on one or another canyon wall and [murdered] by a team of cattle rustlers (94). Krakauer on the other hand, was the only individual out of the three to survive his expedition. In his account of his struggle at the Devil’s Thumb, he includes the phrase: The climb was over (144). This short sentence creates an artificial tone in which he expresses a very emotionless attitude after finishing the harsh odyssey.
Throughout their youth, each adventurer experienced different childhoods from one another. This varied from their education to their family’s lifestyle. McCandless was a stellar student; he was academically superior with an A average and a dedicated runner. His family remained prosperous for many years after his parents started a consultancy firm which became very successful (Read). Krakauer developed a close relationship between himself and his father. He enjoyed mountain climbing at the age of 8 with his father (Morse). He continued a successful life and graduated from Hampshire College. Today he continues to craft bestselling books that have won several awards including the renowned Pulitzer Award. Ruess on the other hand basically had no close relationships with his parents. He spent nearly all his adolescence traveling Southwestern California, while only return home to collect his high school diploma. His only connection between his family members was sustained by sending letters home to his family in Los Angeles.
The choice of leaving society to live in the wilderness is a difficult one. The main reasons to leave the urban culture of man between the three were unlike. McCandless completely loathed society and its regulations. He explains to Jim Gallien, a trucker that picked him up from a highway, that society was simpleminded and restrictive: How I feed myself is none of the government’s business. Fuck their stupid rules (6). Krakauer was aroused by figures of male authority such as McCandless (134). After little consideration of the trek, he was determined to climb the Devil’s Thumb. Ruess traveled since the age of sixteen; his expeditions ranged around Southwestern California. He spent most of his time traveling long distances with little parental advisory until his disappearance.
These three men have their own attributes both similar and diverse from one another. Ranging from childhood to thoughts on society to the details of their journey, they each had a vast amount of comparable attributes. Nature can be described as something magnificent and delightful. It’s all in the eye of the beholder and they saw it exactly the same. All three most probably have met their goal in life: living in nature’s beauty.
