Deadly Force In Law Enforcement Essay

Words: 1873
Pages: 8

Has the Use of Deadly Physical Force by Law Enforcement Become Excessive? Are too Many People Dying at the Hands of Law Enforcement? Imaging you are sitting down in front of your TV with a warm cup of coffee in your hand to start the day. You turn on the morning news to check the weather and catch the highlights before preparing to go to work. Immediately, you are bombarded with Activists like ,Reverend Al Sharpton (Jorgenson , observer.com), and major media outlets, National Action Network ("Rev. Al Sharpton discusses police-community relations in Baltimore, plans Freddie Gray march | National Action Network") and MSNBC ("Police and activism: The fallout"), who are suggesting that there is currently a national epidemic of deaths from the policies of law enforcement and the use of deadly physical force. With thousands of citizens being killed annually by law enforcement and the fact that these activists are receiving vast amounts of media coverage from major media networks, a community’s reactions to a few high profile deaths from the police’s use of deadly physical force have justifiably raised public concerns about police use of deadly force in general, and more specifically, law enforcements use of deadly physical force against African-American men. Is law enforcement really killing the citizens of this nation by the thousands? …show more content…
This will be shown based on a Law Enforcement Officers' legal, lawful and Justifiably use of physical deadly force in response to serious attacks. After I determining the benchmark for how many lethal force incidents we should expect, this essay will then use death certificate records from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to determine exactly how many persons actually die from police use of force in the U.S. each year and how many African-American die each