Police Brutality Divides America

America has had a problem with police brutality for a long time. Every year hundreds of people die at the hands of American police and many more are beaten up. In 2014 alone at least 587 people were killed by cops. You can see a graph of this below.

What galvanised Americans was the shooting of black teenager Michael Brown in the town of Ferguson, Missouri by white police officer Darren Wilson. The fact that Brown was unarmed and the belief that he was running away when Wilson started shooting and then put his hands up to surrender infuriated folks in Ferguson. The latter led to the protest slogan “hands up, don’t shoot”. Pretty soon the whole country was transfixed by what was happening in Ferguson and protests started springing up all across America. Many people noted that police officers in the United States disproportionately target black males, leading the protests to take a racial angle. Eventually the Prosecuting Attorney, Robert McCulloch, decided to convene a grand jury to decide whether or not to indict Officer Wilson in the death of Mike Brown.

The grand jury decided on the 24^th of November to not indict Officer Wilson, which led to huge protests throughout America. As people have looked deeper into how McCulloch performed his job, it has become pretty clear that he threw the case. He used a ‘witness’ who was a known liar to the Attorney to back up Wilson’s testimony. McCulloch has even admitted that he knew that she lied, but he still put forward her testimony! He also gave the grand jury a copy of a Missouri state law which stated that police officers were allowed to shoot fleeing suspects. This is particularly important in the Brown case as there is a lot of witness testimony that states that Brown was fleeing when Wilson began shooting. However laws like that had been ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1985!

As protests were ongoing we learnt of a 12 year old boy called Tamir Rice from Cleveland, Ohio who had been shot and killed by a police officer a couple of days before the news about Wilson getting away with killing Brown broke. He had been shot by cops less than two seconds after police pulled up beside him. He was on his own, he was 12, he was not a threat to anyone, and cops killed him. It makes me feel physically sick. Then to add fuel to the fire news broke that a grand jury in Staten Island, New York had decided not to indict police officers involved in the death of Eric Garner. There is video footage of Garner’s death that shows just how awfully the police officers involved behaved. You can clearly see that it is the police officers who started, then escalated, the confrontation, not Eric Garner. One officer then puts Garner in an illegal chokehold and kills him. I cannot believe that a grand jury watched that video and thought that there should not be an indictment.  

Since there is no official count of the amount of people killed by American police, it is impossible to know exactly how many people have been killed this year. For this graph I used Wikipedia, which lists individual police killings with links to articles about them. By definition there will be more deaths than listed, as there will be ones which were unreported by the media or simply never made it onto Wikipedia. You should notice an uptick in deaths following August. I would hypothesise that since that is when protests began, that the media started to report a lot more on police killings and hence we see a spike in the graph. If this is true then police killings were dreadfully under-reported. If we take the monthly average of August-December and apply it to all of 2014 then you could estimate that 986 people were killed by cops, rather than 587.

Protests have been pretty continuous since the end of November and have even gone international. I was at a vigil for Mike Brown in Manchester in the United Kingdom! Despite that clear problem of police violence, the cases have divided America. Liberals are trying to change America whilst many conservatives deny that there’s a problem. The question for the future is: can America tackle the problem of police brutality?