Is Law Enforcement Misconduct a Serious Problem in the United States

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Is Law Enforcement Misconduct a Serious Problem in the United States Is Police Brutality a serious problem by law enforcement? How can we control police brutality? What is police brutality? Police brutality is defined as “Police brutality is a civil rights violation that occurs when a police officer acts with excessive force by using an amount of force with regards to a civilian that is more than necessary, and is generally beyond the force a reasonable and prudent law enforcement officer would use under the circumstances”. (n.d.) Retrieved from http://definitions.uslegal.com/p/police-brutality/) Police brutality has been an issue in the past and it continues today. Police brutality is not only physical harm but it’s also psychological harm. We need to analyze how much police brutality really goes on out there. We also need to be aware of how often police brutality goes on, and how we as citizens can minimize it by reporting it when we see it or if it happens to us. We know that police officers use excessive force, and they also use their authority to verbally abuse people. So what causes police officers to abuse their authority, and (or) leads to brutality? One of the challenges with this is that not every citizen reports a police brutality, whether they see one happening, heard of one happening from their friends or family or if they themselves were a victim of one. Another challenging issue too is that we know some brutalities are not reported; therefore it makes it harder to measure those versus what is actually reported. Police brutality wouldn’t be an issue if we didn’t have to police our law enforcement officers. Policing our law enforcement officers is a challenge in itself, because who is responsible for this job, how are they going to police them, what actions are they going to take against them when they catch them and what are the penalties for

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