Excessive Police Force: The Racial Disparities in Lethal Encounters

Abstract

Due to the high profile shootings and killings of unarmed citizen civilians in America's united states, there has been a national debate on policing, race and community relations whereby the police force is deemed to be using excessive force. In most cases, people who have felt that the police are responsible or accused of using excessive force rarely face any consequences. In a real sense, law enforcement officers are highly trained in using force in different circumstances (Shane, 2018). in other words, law enforcement officers are authorized to use force in specified circumstances. With this in mind, it, therefore, means that a police officer who engages in force stands a higher chance of going scot-free since the assumption is that they are trained and the force used could be appropriate (Shane, 2018). As far as racism concerning the treatment of suspects by the police is concerned, research done on racial and ethnic disparities in the lethal police force revealed that from the year 2010 to 2014, 2,280 deaths resulted from the police force (Rudovsky, 2017). The research showed that in males more aged than ten years, the mortality rate of African American and Latinos was 2.8 and 1.7, respectively, higher than those of whites under the same age bracket (Rudovsky, 2017). further, the research revealed that police were likely to shoot an unarmed African American compared to shooting an armed white. For instance, a study done in Philadelphia showed that 80 per cent of the death incidents involving African Americans were caused by the police use of force (Rudovsky, 2017). Other studies revealed that non-whites stood higher in being stopped, questioned and arrested and most probably injured by the police than the whites in the united states (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2018). with...