Research and Composition for Change
Dr.Emeka Ekemezie
Engl.1111-03

3/9/16

Do Black Lives Matter?
What is police brutality? “Many citizens define police brutality broadly to include a range of abusive police practices, such as the use of profanity, racial slurs and unnecessary searches, not entailing the use of physical force”. (Holmes and Smith 6) One of our nation’s biggest epidemics is police brutality and more specifically the rate in which it affects most African American communities. I stress the importance of this issue because law officers are supposed to serve and protect but in most communities comprised of mainly African Americans, the police are often looked at as the aggressor and the instigator in most altercations. I plan to show how this injustice affects African American communities. Due to the social networking sites we visit every day, and the fact that majority of Americans have portable audio and video recording devices right in their purse or pocket, we’re able to see some of these gruesome altercations unfold right in front of us. From the Watts riots in 1965 to the 2016 Jamal Clark incident, that happened right here in Minneapolis. Most of the people that chose not to accept the fact that the police officers their tax dollars pays to employ are committing a genocide of an entire race; typically argue that these individuals brought it on themselves. A tactic police try to use to justify these horrendous acts, is to refer to the individual as monsters that needed lethal force in order to be “put down”. As a black man who grew up in a poverty-stricken area, I can honestly say that I’ve grown to have an almost natural distaste for law enforcement; this is because although I've never been in a gang, stood on a corner selling drugs, harmed an innocent person, carried an illegal weapon, or broke into any place that I wasn't supposed to