Violence in American Society by Chris Richardson

Author:Chris Richardson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ABC-CLIO

* * *

3. Numbers in 2013 and 2014 include incidents in Colombia as well.

Police Violence

As online social networking platforms surged in popularity toward the late 2000s, so did mobile technologies that made it much easier for people to photograph and record their surroundings. Few of those daily recordings have garnered as much media attention as those that show police officers violently restraining and shooting civilians. These simultaneous advancements in communications technology not only have led to a rise in the existence of these videos, but have also made them much easier to share widely. These videos, and the activist movements they have sparked, have reignited national conversations about police violence and systemic racism, reform, accountability, and abolition. Police violence in the United States, however, has a history that extends well past recent events.

Police violence—also referred to as “police brutality”—can be understood as violent and intimidating acts committed by police officers against civilians in the midst or in excess of their duties to protect and serve. “Police officers” include all private and publicly funded law enforcement agencies at all levels of government (i.e., federal, state, and local). “Violence,” in this context, is broad but includes acts that inflict physical, psychological, and/or emotional harm on individuals or groups of people. Though police are trained to use physical and, when required, lethal force in the commission of their duties, police violence characterizes actions against civilians that are reasonably understood to be in excess of what was necessary to maintain the safety of officers and the public. This includes instances where the actions of police officers are self-directed or where they may have been ordered by state officials or supervising officers. This further extends to incidents where police officers both have and have not been officially disciplined, indicted, or criminally charged for their actions.

Police violence includes state-sanctioned violence (i.e., militarized actions or government-sponsored acts of violence that specifically target civilians) and incidents where police officers chose not to intervene in a situation that left one or more civilians injured or killed despite their legal responsibility to interrupt and provide protection (e.g., lynchings or other forms of mob violence). This entry paints a broad overview of the historical and current dimensions of state violence on the lands now known as the United States of America, drawing specific connections between settler colonialism, state-sanctioned violence, and police violence. It includes examples of local, state, and federal policy responses and concludes with a section on media representations.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.