1. RESEARCH POSTER PRESENTATION DESIGN © 2015
www.PosterPresentations.com
Police brutality is nothing new, especially in
American society. Here’s a simple definition,
provided by encyclopedia.com: “Police brutality is
the use of any force exceeding that reasonably
necessary to accomplish a lawful police purpose.”
2015 was a year that left hardly an
American city untouched by police
violence, sparking hundreds of Black Lives
Matter protests.
At this moment, the United States government
does not possess the statistics necessary to
know just how many people in total have been
killed by police this year.
The numbers don’t lie: African Americans are killed at a
disproportionately high rate by police officers in the United States.
A Bayesian-model analysis by the
University of California-Davis of data
from another non-federal organization,
the U.S. Police-Shooting Database, dug
even deeper than The Counted:
It factored in not only race, but whether
or not the victim was armed.
By Emma Atkinson
DePaul University Class of 2019
The Indisputable Role of Race in American Police Brutality
What is police brutality?
The killing of African-American teenager
Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in
late 2014 was a catalyst that spurred
greater scrutiny of police interactions
with the American people – most
specifically, with African-Americans.
What is excessive use of force?
According to thelawdictionary.org, excessive
use of force means “a force well beyond what
would be necessary in order to handle a situation.”
The US government has never known that exact number,
despite the now-obsolete Arrest-Related Deaths (ARD)
data collection program conducted by the US Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), a federal agency that
describes itself as “the United States’ primary source for criminal justice statistics.”
Several months before Michael Brown’s death in 2014, BJS suspended the ARD program,
citing a failure to meet data quality standards. Before stepping down in April 2015, US Attorney General
Eric Holder described the current state of the government’s police brutality data collection as
“unacceptable,” as quoted in a 2015 article by the Guardian.
However, there are several non-federal
databases that strive to document each case
of American police brutality.
One example is The Counted, a project by
the Guardian that aims to count each
person killed in the United States by police,
as well as note their demographics and tell
stories of their deaths.
“The median probability across counties of being
{black, armed, and shot by police} is 2.79 (PCI95:
1.72, 4.92) times the probability of being {black,
unarmed, and shot by police}….”
This year, 85 African Americans and 180 white Americans have fallen victim to the police. These
numbers seem counterintuitive – if African Americans are being unfairly targeted, then why have more
white Americans died in encounters with police?
Despite the higher total number of white Americans killed, African Americans are statistically
more likely to die at the hands of law enforcement when adjusting for population. In 2015, they were
more than twice as likely to be victims of lethal police brutality, and the trend has continued into 2016:
this year, African Americans are 2.2 times more likely to be targeted.
African Americans are more than
twice as likely to be killed by police
as compared to white Americans.
“The median probability across counties of being
{black, armed, and shot by police} is 2.94 (PCI95:
2.23, 3.86) times the probability of being {white,
armed, and shot by police}….”
The most shocking of the study’s results
is the last:
“It is worth noting, that on average across counties
in the United States, an individual is as likely to be
{black, unarmed, and shot by police} as {white,
armed, and shot by police}.”
The point is not even that a higher rate of
African-Americans are killed by police,
though that is true; the point is that an
unarmed African American citizen is
clearly deemed by police to be as
dangerous or volatile as a white
American who possesses a weapon.
The fact remains that American citizens
are being slaughtered at a higher rate
than any other group of people by those
who take an oath to protect them.