Why police brutality is a problem

They were called in to deal with a woman they knew had mental illness; she was flailing around and had cut someone with a broken plant pick. To subdue her, one of the officers body-slammed her against a door. Rizer recalls that Montgomery officers were nervous about being watched during such a violent arrest — until they found out he had once been a cop.

When I was a police officer and doing these kind of ride-alongs [as a researcher], you see the underbelly of it. African Americans are arrested and roughed up by cops at wildly disproportionate rates , relative to both their overall share of the population and the percentage of crimes they commit. To understand how the police think about themselves and their job, I interviewed more than a dozen former officers and experts on policing.

These sources, ranging from conservatives to police abolitionists, painted a deeply disturbing picture of the internal culture of policing. Police officers across America have adopted a set of beliefs about their work and its role in our society.

The tenets of police ideology are not codified or written down, but are nonetheless widely shared in departments around the country. These beliefs, combined with widely held racial stereotypes, push officers toward violent and racist behavior during intense and stressful street interactions.

In that sense, police ideology can help us understand the persistence of officer-involved shootings and the recent brutal suppression of peaceful protests.

In a culture where Black people are stereotyped as more threatening, Black communities are terrorized by aggressive policing, with officers acting less like community protectors and more like an occupying army. The beliefs that define police ideology are neither universally shared among officers nor evenly distributed across departments.

There are more than , local police officers across the country and more than 12, local police agencies. The officer corps has gotten more diverse over the years, with women, people of color, and LGBTQ officers making up a growing share of the profession. Speaking about such a group in blanket terms would do a disservice to the many officers who try to serve with care and kindness. However, the officer corps remains overwhelmingly white, male, and straight. Federal Election Commission data from the cycle suggests that police heavily favor Republicans.

And it is indisputable that there are commonly held beliefs among officers. The officer fires first, and misses; Brannan shoots back. In the ensuing firefight, both men are wounded, but Dinkheller far more severely. It is screened in police academies around the country ; one training turns it into a video game-style simulation in which officers can change the ending by killing Brannan. Jeronimo Yanez, the officer who killed Philando Castile during a traffic stop, was shown the Dinkheller video during his training.

The purpose of the Dinkheller video, and many others like it shown at police academies, is to teach officers that any situation could escalate to violence. Cop killers lurk around every corner. But contrary to the impression the Dinkheller video might give trainees, murders of police are not the omnipresent threat they are made out to be.

According to Bureau of Labor Statistics data , about 13 per , police officers died on the job in Keep in mind, injuries that do not result in an ER visit are not included here. This violence affects Black people disproportionately, to an alarming degree.

A study published in the Journal of Urban Health in co-authored by Feldman analyzed data collected from a nationally representative sample of 66 U. In this study, private security guards were included alongside police officers and other legal authorities. They found that Black people went to the ER for law enforcement—perpetrated injuries at a 4.

Researchers also found that legal intervention violence increased dramatically, by Of course, seeing a loved one or member of any race injured or killed unexpectedly due to any cause is horrific. And although Black people are killed by the police at a rate disproportionate to their population size, about half of the people shot and killed by police are white, according to the Washington Post police shootings database.

But there are particular dimensions to the pain of seeing a Black individual brutalized or killed by a police officer that are not immediately apparent to most non-Black people, beginning with the historical weight these incidents bear and the collective trauma they evoke. A Black person being injured or killed at the hands of the police in is a devastating reminder of that disturbing period in American history.

Police killings of Black people also represent the continued oppression and devaluation of Black lives at a systemic level. Evidence demonstrates that police killings of Black people indeed have effects that extend far beyond the Black families or social circles that know the individual who died into Black communities across the country. A study published in the Lancet in used two sets of data—police killings of unarmed Black Americans and the self-reported mental health of Black Americans in the state where the person was killed—to see if they could establish a causal link.

Of the , respondents, 38, of them had had at least one police killing of an unarmed Black person in their state in the last three months. Researchers found that for each additional police killing of an unarmed Black person, Black respondents living in that state reported an additional 0. No such correlations were found among white respondents or for killings of armed Black Americans. Police brutality impacts mental health above and beyond the actual incidents of it, though.

The interminable uncertainty of the looming threat of police brutality can take severe psychological tolls on the people who are most vulnerable to it—i. This kind of stress and anticipation "is not visible to other people. As Dr. Black individuals, and especially Black men, bring this fear and stress into every interaction with police of which Black people have many more, due to policies and practices that support racial profiling , Alang says—including what should be peaceful encounters, like when they get stopped on the street or pulled over for a traffic violation.

A cultural regime of dehumanization has been constructed in many police departments. In that fertile ground, racial biases can spread and become entrenched. But the regime can be deconstructed. M any people go into policing because they are idealistic. The police recruits scored higher on average than the college students who had participated in earlier studies.

Recruits are told that a guy with a knife 21 feet away can run up and stab you before you have the chance to draw your gun. Even when your gun is drawn on someone with his back turned, he can pivot and pull his trigger before you have the chance to fire.

About 70 percent of police officers say they have never fired their gun while on the job, but on average, 71 hours of their training are devoted to firearm skills and 60 hours to self-defense, according to a Bureau of Justice report, while only 43 hours are spent on community-policing measures, such as cultural-diversity training, human relations, mediation, and conflict management.

Annie Lowrey: Defund the police. Many training programs take recruits out of civilian life and put them in a boot-camp atmosphere. Years on the job have a tendency to reinforce this separation. I left the University of Chicago to become a police reporter on the South Side of that city.

The first thing I learned, during that brief stint, was that the detectives in the Chicago Police Department were just as intelligent as the professors back at school. The second thing I learned is that cops have a profound sense of service, but have to spend their days among people who are at their worst moment, and often among individuals when they are at their worst—responding to domestic violence, rape, drug dealing, and murder.

The pressures are intense. Though quotas are illegal in some states, many cops are urged by their superiors to ramp up their production—issuing more tickets and making more arrests. Officers are also encouraged to respond to calls more swiftly. Constant hyper-vigilance and stress become the background tone of life.

The organizational culture of their departments too often turns them into street warriors, occupying soldiers. Decades ago, the social scientist James Q. Wilson wrote that there are three types of police officer: the watchman, the legalist, and the service provider.

In the videos, we saw cops armored in riot gear. American law-enforcement agencies have acquired billions of dollars in surplus equipment, including bayonets and grenade launchers. The person on the other side of the equipment is rendered less visible. Almost all cops resist this pressure most of the time, and we owe them our respect, honor, and gratitude. Which personality factors are most likely to correlate with excessive use of force?

Which mental disorders show the highest correlation with deadly use of force? What forms of training help most to reduce implicit bias and improve the situation? Ongoing research on these and other topics is the cornerstone of moving forward and improving the situation when it comes to the excessive use of force by police officers and the disproportionate impact that it has on racial minorities. What about defunding police departments? This is a tactic that has been brought up as a solution to police brutality.

Defunding the police means taking money away from funding the police department and instead sending those funds to invest in the communities that are struggling the most and where most of the policing occurs. It's very much similar to the concept of directing money toward prevention instead of dealing with problems after the fact. While not a simple solution, there is merit in funding programs and communities that are struggling instead of putting more people behind bars.

Understanding the psychology behind police brutality is the first step toward fixing the problem. Unfortunately, the situation is inherently one that needs to be fixed from the top down, beginning with the systems of government and how they allocate their funding.

When better training and education is in place for police officers, as well as better mental health supports, then better outcomes may result. It's also worth noting that while this problem seems to be most prominent in the United States, other countries may have their own racial tensions for example, in Canada and Australia there is tension between government and Indigenous people.

The United States, however, struggles more than most with the use of deadly force in the form of gun violence. For this reason, the psychology of police brutality is only one piece of the puzzle. The other piece will be understanding the problem of gun violence in the United States, and how it compares to rates of gun violence in other countries. Learn the best ways to manage stress and negativity in your life.

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