Police brutality is becoming an extremely pressing issue in America. All across the country we see instances of continuous escalation and the use of unnecessary and excessive force, typically against minorities. Police officers' actions are often absolved, despite obvious misconduct, because of their socioeconomic, ethnic and gender privileges. Police officers are often ill-prepared or poorly trained for many situations, as they continue to act unethically, and sometimes unlawfully. A major problem is that the law does not necessarily reflect what is morally obligatory. This can be seen in the recent Spring Valley High School incident.
Last Monday, the school resource officer for the local Spring Valley High School repeatedly asked a student to hand over her cell phone. When she responded that she had not done anything wrong and refused to give up or get off of her cell phone, the officer, Ben Fields, overturned her desk with her in it by placing his arm around her neck. With her and her desk on the floor, Fields then lifted her by her clothes and threw her across the classroom. Fields was terminated from the Richland County Sheriff's Department within two days after the incident on the grounds that his throwing of the student was, “not a proper technique and should not be used in law enforcement.” Fields has a reputation for excessive force, specifically against black students, accompanying his brutality with fallacious allegations of gang-related activity.
I think that there are three issues at work here. The first is that most police departments require nothing more than U.S. citizenship, 21 years of age, a driver's license and a high school diploma for employment. Many police officers have not had the chance to sufficiently develop their mental and ethical character before entering into a field, which is, academically and culturally speaking, stagnant. This, along with the natural effects of unchecked power as seen in the Stanford Prison Experiment, gives rise to violent proclivities, which in turn lead to the use of excessive force as seen with Officer Fields.
Secondly, officers like Fields sometimes undergo less than two months of in-field training, with little to no emphasis on ethics in a time when social injustice is perpetuated by repressive state apparatus like the police force. By partaking in this necessary but violent enforcement of the status quo, it is important for our police officers to understand the implications of their actions, specifically what ideologies their actions should be enforcing and how to go about enforcing them ethically. The fact of the matter is that they do not, as evidenced by incidents like the one at Spring Valley.
This leads to the final issue, which arises from police officers’ requirement to meet certain periodic quotas, like arrest quotas. Many officers have reported that in order to meet these quotas, they, by the dispositions of their regulations, target minority areas of cities. Often they are known to go into predominantly black neighborhoods and make arrests based not on evidence, but rather on a suspicion born out of and supported by the ideology of our society, which criminalizes skin color. Due to the effects of gentrification on minority groups and crime’s causal correlation to poverty, many of these arrests lead to charges and thus successfully fill the officers’ quotas. The problem here is that police officers gravitate toward crime in often less fortunate minorities, thinking that more force will lower the crime rates. This is done without consideration of the true causes of crime. Studies have shown time and time again that reductions in unemployment and incarceration as well as increased rigor of public academia are far more efficacious crime-reducers than larger, more vigilant police forces.
In short, these three problems are creating a system that puts ill-prepared and often violently inclined people in positions of unchecked power. This power goes unchecked because most people conform to the ideology of society that marginalizes and denigrates people of color.