Jasmine R. Michigan

Police Brutality

My take on police brutality

There are many topics I want to speak about and it was hard to chose one, but the topic I chose to address is police brutality. I think that when hiring, they aren’t paying attention to some people’s mental stability, and attitude problems. Many officers hold grudges against people, are biased towards certain races, and over use their powers just because they can. Almost everyday you see on the news that an unarmed person was shot and killed, and sometimes it’s unjustified. Other times you see police beating people and tasing them longer than they’re supposed to just to make them suffer. Like the story about a cop named Timothy Runnels who beat and tased teen bryce Masters into a coma, for resisting his arrest after the officer didn’t tell him why he was being arrested. In the video, Masters was tased in the chest for 20 seconds, which is four times longer than a cop is trained to use a taser, causing him to actually die momentarily until the paramedics could resuscitate him. The teen hadn’t even fought back when told he was getting arrested but the cop still decided to use excessive force, and also slammed the teen down face first onto concrete causing brain damage. Hearing and seeing things like that upset me very much, but i’m happy that we’re in times where people are starting to take videos that can be evidence of wrongdoing. I feel like having body cameras might not be the problem solver to end these situations but it does help a lot as far as proving situations to be just or unjust.

Okemos High School

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