In my last blog I talked about some of the most devastating school shootings that have occurred at the hands of poor gun laws being in place giving the ability for anyone to purchase one despite the persons age, background, mental health, etc. In this blog post I will be talking about police brutality, but not the entirety of it, just when police use their gun unrightfully so and commit homicide.
Over the years there has been more and more problems arising involving police brutality across the nation. The Washington Post has been tracking every fatal shooting done by an on-duty police officer since 2015, and since then there has been more than 5,000 shootings. In the past year alone, 985 people have been shot and killed by police. Through the statistics shown the rate at which black Americans are fatally shot is more than two times as high as the rate of white Americans. Most victims of police brutality are young males.
In 2020, 27-year-old Rayshard Brooks was wrongfully killed by officers Garret Rolfe and Devin Brosnan in Atlanta, Georgia. Brooks fell asleep in his car blocking a drive through lane at a fast food restaurant, and after the police talked to him for 40 minutes where Brooks explained the situation, he was shot twice. Another incident that took place in 2020 happened in Louisville, Kentucky when three police officers arrived at Breonna Taylor’s apartment while her and her boyfriend were asleep. The officers were there to execute a search from a warrant for an ongoing drug case. They thought it was a break in and her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, called 9-1-1 and fired his firearm which he had a license for. Taylor, who was unarmed, was shot 8 times and killed. In 2019, a woman in Miami, Florida was killed in front of her eight year old nephew just for being at home. Atatiana Jefferson was only 28 years old when she was shot through the window of her own home after the police were responding to a call from her neighbor that Jefferson’s front door was left open. In 2014 Aura Rosser was 40 years old when her boyfriend called the police for her to be escorted out of the house because of an altercation that arose. The report said Rosser was holding a knife and refused to drop it when the officers entered the home. One officer used a taser to restrain her, and then after another officer fired a single shot that killed her. Officer David Ried who shot Rosser was not charged with anything. After this the police department and city implemented reforms which included equipping officers with body cameras. In 2018, Stephon Clark was 22 years old when he was shot at more than 20 times in the backyard of his grandmother’s yard. The officers said they believed he was holding a gun when in actuality he was holding a cellphone.
These are only a few examples of police brutality involving gun violence. There are so many other people in this nation that have been victims of police brutality such as George Floyd, Daniel Prude, Freddie Gray, Eric Garner, and the list goes on. These victims did not die of gunshots, but another form of police abusing their power and killing someone who was not supposed to be harmed. The number of people that have lost their lives to police gun violence and police brutality is too high. These incidents across the country sparked protests, riots, marches, the fight for people who were wrongfully shot or killed, and the Black Lives Matter movement. Police gun violence is injustice and needs to be stopped. There have been steps and guides taken in order to help prevent future police brutality and the fixing of the system, but not enough. This issue has been going on for too long and affects the country’s population as a whole.
Police violence has also had an impact on voter participation. On one side of looking at this people are more determined to vote to fix the issue at hand which has caused an increase in voter turnout. However the other side to this issue is that police violence may push people away from voting because they lose faith in the system and government which leads them to disengage from partaking in civic duties. The killings of people whose lives should not have been taken are injustice and it is a civic issue that needs to be dealt with on a high level quickly before more innocent lives are lost.
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