Adal Washington

Police Brutality

Police brutality needs to stop.

Dear future Mr. or Ms. President,

Police brutality is a big problem in our community and policemen keep targeting minorities and we are doing nothing about it all we are doing are sitting on our asses and writing letters to a president that might not even care. That's why we have to take action and fight for our rights and end racially motivated police brutality.

People have been treating minorities like crap and we need to do something about it, like when we had a riot when they beat up Rodney King we should have had one when Freddie Grey mysteriously died in police custody they said he was in possession of and illegal switchblade and he fell into a coma and died because of his injuries and black men are shot and killed 2.5 more times than white people. In an article from The Washington Post, it states:

Police have shot and killed a young black man (ages 18 to 29) — such as Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. —175 times since January 2015; 24 of them were unarmed. Over that same period, police have shot and killed 172 young white men, 18 of whom were unarmed. Once again, while in raw numbers there were similar totals of white and black victims, blacks were killed at rates disproportionate to their percentage of the U.S. population. Of all of the unarmed people shot and killed by police in 2015, 40 percent of them were black men, even though black men make up just 6 percent of the nation’s population.

This shows that police violence is linked to racism. They are targeting more minorities than they are white people.

The most targeted group of people are African Americans. For example, “African Americans...account for 24 percent of those fatally shot and killed by the police despite being just 13 percent of the U.S. population” (Lowery). As The Post noted in a new analysis published last week, that means black Americans are 2.5 times as likely as white Americans to be shot and killed by police officers. This is unacceptable because police are targeting people based on their race.

Some people would say that they are disrespecting the police like “young people in America, especially teenagers, have a defiance toward authority not seen since the Vietnam days” (Grigg). He is wrong because just one teenager or a couple do so bad doesn’t mean that all the tenagers that are good should get what people think they deserve. Like when the police arrested a minority and killed them they can just make up another story about oh they had a gun when they shouldn't have because they are under age really you really would believe that us as people that are not cops depend on you when something bad is happening we depend on you when there is a person breaking into our house and we put our lives into your hands and all you do is toss that into the garbage like it was nothing just because you had a bad day and you want to take it out on black men and women doesn't mean you should because it just make it worse for yourself and just imagine you a black male being shot for no reason beat for no reason and they just made up a story like oh they had a gun how would you feel?

What I am trying to say is that police brutality is a problem and we need to stop it from happening. We need to stand up and do something about it, like another riot. Police need to stop targeting African Americans. If you do not do it, there will be more and more violence. The violence needs to stop.

Sincerely,

Adal T.

sources:

Worden, Robert. "The Causes of Police Brutality: Theory and Evidence on Police

Use of Force." Criminal Justice Theory: Explaining the Nature and Behavior of Criminal Justice. New York: Routledge, 2015. 149-205. Print.

"Freddie Gray's Death in Police Custody - What We Know." BBC News. BBC, 23 May 2016. We

b. 18 Oct. 2016.

Gray, Madison. "The L.A. Riots: 15 Years After Rodney King." Time. Time Inc., 2007. Web. 18 Oct. 2016

West Seattle High School

6th period LA9H

Hopkins Honors Introduction to Literature

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