Police Brutality and The Mutual Trust Issue

Since the police are willing to devote themselves to common citizens to live in a safer environment, they usually are perceived as the “guardian angel” for the public. However, since when, in the United States, the public have some serious trust issues with the police nowadays because of all the scandal, low-efficiency, police brutality, etc. Therefore, I tried to figure out what are the causes of this circumstance and what can help to resolve this problem from different perspective. It is not a thorough research paper, but it will give you a general idea about the mutual trust issue.

First of all, racial disparity could be an essential factor for trust issue. Research shows that “Racial minorities made up about 37.4 percent of the general population in the US and 46.6 percent of armed and unarmed victims, but they made up 62.7 percent of unarmed people killed by police”. We can see that the percentage of unarmed minority killed by police are almost double compared to white victim. This statistic proves that the police has way less trust in minority. It is systematic discrimination in the police department. Now we can understand why minority might shows less mutual trust with police.

In addition, this kind of biased treatment also happened to young kids in school. According to the statistics of PBS organization, it claims that “In Virginia, black students make up 39 percent of the enrollment in public schools with at least one arrest but 75 percent of school-based arrests.” In school, black students still have higher arrest rate for vandalism or conflict with other students in a comparison with white students. These minority young kids will have the strong subconscious and emotion of distrust against police and think that they are only here to punish them rather than support them, especially if they were innocent. These kids might even refuse to accept help from the police and got affected in the rest of their life.

Second, unnecessary conducts in the law enforcement process could be a huge part that disgrace the police department and cause a sense of distrust. We all have the situations or needs to call police sometime in our life, but we might not get the kind of help we image. Based on the study of USA TODAY Network, it founds that “At least 85,000 law enforcement officers across the USA have been investigated or disciplined for misconduct over the past decade.”. It includes drug framing, sexual harassment, abuse the power of the police badge, etc. According to the USA TODAY Network, it claims that “The agency record includes 22,924 investigations of officers using excessive force, 3,145 allegations of rape, child molestation and other sexual misconduct and 2,307 cases of domestic violence by officers.”. It seems that these statistics have given the public enough reasons and evidence to distrust the polices. Police has been abusing their power to break the law for their own benefit.

My position on this issue is that the public still need to try their best and trust the police department. As a student of IU O’Neil, the incident about a former student threatening the school that happened last week actually explain a lot to me. I was afraid because I did not receive any forms of notification until a week after. I used to believe that the police will take care of incidents and report any kinds of danger in the city. However, they actually do not report everything and just choose some of the information for notification. And all of these happened are because the school do not want the incident that could hurt the reputation of the university. The school actually control what can be or cannot be reported.

After that, I still believe it is better choice for trusting the police. Even with that systematic discrimination and abuse of power, there are still more good police out there risk their life for citizens’ safety. The trust issues between citizens and police are still fixable, it requires mutual efforts.