“Freeze and put your hands where I can see them”. A phrase we’ve heard all too often in movies, shows and in real life. It’s understandable if a person has committed a crime worthy of punishment, but it’s another thing to wrongfully accuse, beat, manhandle and arrest someone with no substantial reasoning. Women, specifically, have come into grim encounters with brutality by police officers but the police’s actions have seemingly been bypassed and “swept under the rug”.
You may ask yourself, why hasn’t police brutality been combated? The simplest answer would be corruption. As much as we’d love to believe that the government protects us from unconstitutional law enforcement, police automatically have the upper hand in society. Their word over an “alleged” criminal’s passes for the right to arrest any day! Corruption! The government, time and time again, has turned a blind eye to police abusing their powers.
Zeroing in on a particular group targeted by police brutality: The African American women. Women of all races and ages have been victims of abusive treatment by law enforcers throughout the country, but there seems to be an underlying trend of cruelty against black women in the states. But its stories like the Miriam Carey car chase make it hard to love America as your own.
On Oct. 3, 2013, Carey was at a checkpoint near the White House and refused to stop her vehicle. In the attempt to escape, she knocked over police officers in her way, speeding off into the busy and pedestrian-filled streets of Washington D.C. After a lengthy chase, police cornered Carey and shot her dead.
The sad part of the story perhaps, is not that she died without a given reason, but police justified her death by blaming their actions on the risen tensions in Washington due to a Naval Yard shooting that happened a month prior. Or perhaps the saddest factor: her 1-year-old daughter was in the back seat of a car being shot at.
It’s unfortunate that media made it seem as though Carey was a possible terrorist. An unarmed, African American woman was thus labeled a threat and police were praised instead of reprimanded.
To boot, how about the instance when an Arizona State University professor Ersula Ore was attempting to cross the street and was stopped by police and asked for I.D. When she refused the request, the officer began to manhandle her in what looked like an attempt to handcuff her. She struggled with the officer, notifying him that she quote, “didn’t know what she was in violation of”. She told CNN that the officer had no valid reason to arrest her. He told her that resisting to show I.D. was against the law.
Ore was later charged with assaulting a police officer and resisting arrest. And of course, the ASU came out with a statement saying, “We have found no evidence of inappropriate actions by ASUPD officers”, when in a video, it was clear that the officer threw Ore to the ground.
Ben Max, journalist from Gotham Gazette told a journalist team that the NYPD has been making efforts to thoroughly monitor and supervise police activity in the city. “They are making changes to the administration”, Max says. “They have a new position called the Inspector General of the NYPD, whose main purpose is to do independent oversight of police officers… there’s even an office that looks closely into NYPD practices”.
Could this be a small but highly effective resolution that could gradually combat law enforcement abusing their power?
There’s no telling when police brutality against women will come to a halt. When government will take responsibility for injustices of their police. When they will realize that brutality exists solely because of the lack of discipline within the law enforcement bureau. Cases such as Carey’s and Ore’s go down in history with other cases like Rodney King, proving the corruption of police to be alive and well. Thus, I propose that police officers to be charged for brutality and that the government wouldn’t be bias in their decisions to reprimand these abusive officers. African Americans have been targeted by police for decades, adding to the statistic of cruelty against their women.