Police brutality is a social problem. Research Paper

Police Brutality
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Abstract
Police brutality is a social problem that has roots in the history of the nation. It dates back several decades and has been directed at different groups over the years, from whites, gays, Jews, Spanish immigrants and the African Americans among others. Recent developments have brought about an awareness relative to the focus on the African Americans. Some of the focus is relative to the biases brought by the media while others are a reflection of the failed justice system. There is need to evaluate information about the same from a critical point of view in a bid to unearth the truths, half-truths and the lies from either side of the debate.
Introduction
In the recent years, the media platforms has been awash with the news on police brutality. Every few months, there is an incidence involving the police. This is topic that draws some very heated debates and one that deserves to be elaborated in a manner that gives a critical review, relative to the underpinnings of the situation. As a highlight of the debate, there has been two main campaigns these are; All Lives Matter and Black Lives Matter. These are campaigns that draw the line between the different sentiments. Ideally, there has been a bias in the cases involving police brutality, where majority of the victims are the African Americans (Cosgrove, 2015). There have been several cases where the police have been involved in shootings of unarmed African American men, part of which inflamed the debate and more importantly the tension on the issue. On the other hand there are views relating to the element of police provocation. Some of the quarters point out that in some of the cases the victims will have provoked the police to the extent of being violent. At the same time there are sentiments that point to the element of other races also being involved and finally the police’s need to protect themselves. This is a debate that has turned the police work into a dicey affair as they are always unsure of what could ensure with any given situation (Lopez, 2017). The Movement, Black Lives Matter created after the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson. The All Lives Matter slogan became quite popular during the 2016 presidential campaign. Of importance in this paper is to review the situation and evaluate the debates on the two sides of the divide with a critical approach.
Background
The unwarranted use of force by the police which is basically referred to as police brutality, is illegal in the United States and spans across several elements (Cosgrove, 2015). These includes; torture, mayhem, assault, battery and finally murder. Some of the more broad approaches also include harassment such as false arrest, verbal abuse and intimidation. It is interesting to note that, elements of police brutality can be traced to as early as the 19 and 20th centuries. Further, all races, ages, genders, ethnicities and classes have been exposed to elements of police brutality in the United States over the years (Moore, 2018).
This is especially the case considering that in the late 19th and early 20th century, poor as well as working class whites were subjected to discriminatory policing especially in the northern ...