The Role of Students in Condemning the Solution to the Social Problem of Police Brutality
Image Link: https://pixabay.com/photos/police-brutality-violence-4645199/
From the sidewalks of Minneapolis to the barrios of Rio de Janeiro, police violence, also known as excessive use of force by the police, can result in murder, injury, and ruin. Too often, all over the world, police kill or gravely hurt people during racist arrests. In numerous other instances, police respond to protests or rallies by using force. To show the gravity of these social problems, statistics show that throughout 2019 and 2020, police have used excessive force against demonstrators, using tear gas and rubber bullets. Officers who murder or hurt someone after using excessive force are frequently not prosecuted. College and even high school students have a role to play in dealing with this issue. The following are some of the actions learners can use to reduce and hopefully remove this scourge.
Demand Reforms
Learners can press their colleges should impose a set of demands on police agencies that combat police brutality by boosting transparency. To begin with, they might alter the conditions of their revenue-generating contracts to make sure the police departments adhere to crucial changes. Local police agencies, for example, could be required by colleges to follow standards that limit the amount of force they can utilize during exchanges. Chokeholds, strangleholds, and firing at moving vehicles are all prohibited under these standards, as is de-escalation, warnings before shooting, and detailed reporting, all of which have been demonstrated to reduce police killings.
Push for a Ban on Aggressive Police Tactics
Colleges must likewise work to enhance their respective campus safety teams in order to model the necessary change, and it is the work of the learners to ensure it is streamlined. Almost every four-year college with more than 2,500 learners has its own campus police department, staffed by officers who are not dissimilar to those employed by traditional law enforcement. They all go through the same instruction and are almost all armed. Furthermore, as many as 80% of sworn college police officers have arrest and patrol authority outside of campuses; their powers extend beyond the university. Abuse by police has been highly documented in academic journals as found at https://edubirdie.com/examples/police-brutality/ where the greatest minds in the world draft numerous essays. Many reforms to campus police units should reflect what schools want from local police officers who cooperate with them, such as the implementation of police accountability rules.
Campaign for Demilitarization of Campus Police Departments
Police brutality statistics show that providing federal military weaponry to police departments, such as explosives, armored tanks, and battering rams, has been found to increase officer violence. While schools lack the right or jurisdiction to prevent local police from acquiring military weapons, they might demilitarize their campus police agencies. Surprisingly, hundreds of campus police agencies have gotten military weaponry due to a policy that allows universities to receive military hardware while merely paying for the shipment or transfer of the equipment rather than the equipment itself.
Conclusion
Addressing police abuse on campus is merely the beginning of undoing systemic racism and increasing fairness in higher learning. More needs to be done in these contexts to address bigger concerns of institutional racism in colleges and universities, such as boosting the support, representation, and retention of black students, professors, and personnel. As organizations with considerable community ties and financial and political clout, colleges must do more to make amends for higher education’s racist biases.
