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My thesis: Police brutality is a significant and pressing issue in the…

- - - - Police should not be killing people at all, but people of color (specifically black people) are targeted at significantly higher rates than white people. Black people are three times as likely to be killed by police, despite being 1.3 times as likely to be unarmed (Mapping Police Violence). This trend persists in 47 out of 50 states as well as in the overall federal trend (Mapping Police Violence).
        
        98.3% of police brutality/killing instances have gone entirely unpunished since 2013. This makes police feel invincible and allows them to continue their practices with little to no consequence (Mapping Police Violence).
        
        "Only 110 law enforcement officers nationwide have been charged with murder or manslaughter in an on-duty shooting — despite the fact that around around 1,000 people are fatally shot by police annually" (Ameliad).
        
        In many cases, police are not required to report instances of brutality. This protects them from consequences and gives us inaccurate numbers; the rate of police brutality and the racial disparities are likely even more severe than the statistics available to us (Ameliad).
        
        Many police practices, including stop-and-frisk practices open the door to racial bias, because it allows cops to make judgements about people's crime activity based on their appearance. Additionally, cops receive little to no deescalation training and only recieve a total of 6 months of job training, unlike other countries that require police to undergo years of deescalation training (Campaign Zero).
        
        Violent crime rate has little to no impact on rates of police brutality, so the issue cannot be attributed to higher crime rates in the United States nor to higher crime rates amongst people of color. Many states are worse than others; In Chicago, for example, black people are 22 times as likely to be murdered by the police than white people. (Mapping Police Violence).
        
        Potential solutions: Policy reform, abolishment of stop and frisk practices, defunding of overfunded police departments, de-militarization of the police, accountability for police who commit acts of brutality, forcing police to report instances of brutality, deescalation training for police, a formal police training and education system that offers training similar to that of other countries (Campaign Zero).
        
        Impacts of police brutality on society: Police brutality leads to a severe distrust of the police, which reduces people's likeliness to follow the law and therefore damages overall law and order in the United States. Police brutality leaves many victims feeling violated by those who are supposed to protect them, and leaves many families grieving over the loss of loved ones at the hands of police. Police brutality increases racial inequality in the United States, worsening racial tensions and risking a "black flight" (Lumsden).
        
        This rate is much higher if you are also disabled (Abrams).
      - Structural racism is embedded into nearly every US institution, and the police system is no exception. This is why inequalities are seen in nearly every aspect of modern life, including housing, healthcare, police violence, poverty, etc. Because it is an institutional issue and not an individual issue of "a few bad apples" in the police force, we must address it on an institutional level . Many of these institutions were still being implemented until the 1960s and many of them have not been resolved, and therefore, we cannot ignore the issue of racism as it prevails today (Bailey).
- - - - Police brutality is an issue, but the media is spinning it to be racially motivated when it is not (Meincke).
        
        More white people are killed by police than black people; black-on-black crime kills more black people than police brutality does
        
        Rebuttal: Black people only make up 13% of the population, so even though more white people are killed by police, black people are still killed at disproportionate rates (Mapping Police Violence). Additionally, every racial group faces higher rates of violence amongst themselves. For example, most white people are killed by other white people; most Black people are killed by other Black people; and most Latinx people are killed by other Latinx people.Black on Black crime, really, has nothing to do with the issue of police brutality. This is a straw man logical fallacy (Massie).
        
        Rebuttal: Other than Asian-Americans, white people are the least likely to be brutalized by police. Black people are 3x as likely to be brutalized as white people are despite being more likely to be unarmed at the time of police violence (Mapping Police Violence). These disparities are likely not coincidental.
      - People will not (and should not) rally for the issue of police brutality because of violent demonstrations and riots (Robbins)
        
        Rebuttal: Riots are a result of pent up anger/tension due to social injustice and tend to be more effective than peaceful protests. Despite this, BLM protests this summer were at least 93% peaceful; the idea that every protest involves rioting is a misconception. Regardless, the actions of rioters should not prevent someone from recognizing an injustice and speaking out against it.
      - Police are simply frightened due to their difficult and dangerous line of work; we should not blame them for the mistakes they make
        
        Police officers in other countries face similar risks to their lives when they are at work, yet they do not brutalize their citizens to the same extent that American police do (Prison Policy Initiative). Additionally, many victims of police brutality are unarmed at the time, posing no real risk to officers (Mapping Police Violence).
    - - Black people do not commit more crimes, they are simply caught for more crimes due to over-policing, and charged with higher sentences due to racial sentencing disparities (Lumsden). These statistics are derived from arrest rates, not actual crime rates, so due to over-policing of black neighborhoods, more black people are arrested. Additionally, poverty is directly linked to crime rates, and due to the history of racial segregation (housing discrimination, job discrimination, redlining, etc) Black people have not been given the opportunity to accumulate wealth as white people have. Therefore, POC are more likely to be poor and therefore more likely to commit crime (University of Minnesota). Studies show that rates of crime in poor areas are the same amongst races (Psychology Today).