Police brutality, particularly against African Americans in America, has reached its precipice, as illustrated by the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Michael Brown, and Eric Garner, amongst too many others. Almost a thousand people are killed due to police violence every year in America. African Americans are three and a half times more likely than white people to be killed by police despite being non-threatening or unarmed. Additionally, African American teenagers are twenty-one times more likely to be killed by police than white teens. An African American person is killed about every 40 hours in America. Unfortunately, it took the brutal deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, which occurred in a short amount of time, to light a fire. Their deaths led to the Black Lives Matter demonstrations, which have been recognized as the largest movement in American history.

Consequently, the support for addressing police brutality has increased; there has been a 10% drop in people who believe the police are using the appropriate amount of force in each situation from 2016 to 2020. There has also been a 13% drop in people who say the police treat racial and ethnic groups equally in the same amount of time. The Black Lives Matter movement has led to some policy changes in parts of America. However, policy change has been the exception, not the rule, as police brutality has failed to subside in other parts of America. In Rochester, New York, a nine-year-old girl was handcuffed and pepper-sprayed by the police during a family disturbance call earlier in February. A police officer was suspended while two of his colleagues were placed on administrative leave as their body cam videos showed the little girl crying for her father while the police struggled to get her into the police car. This conveys there has not been a concerted national response that will curtail police brutality.

There are multiple reasons why police brutality has persisted in America, stemming from either policy responses being inadequate or non-existent. First, there is a lack of data. This has made it difficult to design policy solutions addressing police brutality; it is unclear which law-enforcement methods are effective. Furthermore, the available data is spotty. For instance, the FBI national database created in 2019 only contains 40% of American police officers. Data submission is also voluntary, which means there is a self-selection bias. There are also issues because data is not collected systematically, which means it is unreliable and inaccurate. Second, research conveys police training may be failing. Police in America receives only 58 hours of firearms training on average, eight hours of de-escalation training and crisis intervention training. They are underprepared for dealing with situations without the use of a gun. Further, implicit bias training may increase bias due to a rebound effect as police are trained to suppress stereotypical thinking while leaving their deep-seated prejudices intact. Third, it is tough to discipline police officers in America, which shields them from accountability. Since police internally handle investigations and decide consequences, fewer than 1 in 12 policy misconduct complaints nationally results in disciplinary action for the police officer responsible. For instance, in the situation with the nine-year-old girl, while Mayor Lovely Warren wanted to take ‘immediate and serious action,’ she was precluded from doing so due to state law and union contracts.

Also, it is difficult to fire a police officer due to union contracts. Even when police officers are fired for misconduct or resigned before an investigation, they are often rehired. Furthermore, disciplinary actions are not tracked, which means a police officer’s performance is not monitored. As data from the New York police department denotes, repeated negative behaviour in a police officer’s files means they are three times more likely to fire their gun than other officers. Lawrence Sherman, the director of the Cambridge Centre for Evidence-based policing, states that tracking Derek Chauvin, the police officer who killed George Floyd, could have taken Chauvin out of policing as he had received 18 prior complaints. Further, it is difficult for police officers to face civil lawsuits due to qualified immunity, which protects them from the financial detriment caused by civilian payouts.

Finally, practices that have a disproportionate effect on people of colour should end. One such practice is Broken Windows policing which has for decades focused on policing minor crimes, which has had a disproportionate effect on people of colour. This practice has led to over-policing and criminalization of communities of colour. Other practices include profiling and stop and frisk, allowing police to intervene if they suspect a person based on superficialities such as a person’s skin colour.

There needs to be a two-pronged approach in eliminating police brutality: addressing the reasons for police brutality and reducing policing while adopting alternatives to policing. This approach is more likely to work because it is unlikely policing will be fully replaced, and in the meantime, the root causes of police brutality need to be addressed.

There first needs to be a concerted effort in collecting data to address police brutality. More data will allow scientists to identify factors that can predict whether a person will engage in police brutality. These factors include bad temper, toxic masculinity, racial bias, amongst others. This will aid in screening who should be recruited to become a police officer. One study indicated when an officer is required to file a report when they pointed their gun at someone but did not shoot has led to reduced rates of armed deaths. This conveys that collecting data aids in holding police officers accountable and that it should be compulsory for data to be collected at all law enforcement agencies as any data leads to fewer deaths.

Second, an investment must be made in sustained and rigorous evidence-based training. While procedural justice training has some evidentiary support, implicit bias and mental health training is not effective. Current training programs need to be replaced with a curriculum de-emphasizing the use of guns and force, including banning the use of choke- and strangleholds. Instead, there should be an emphasis on using force as a last resort, relationship-based policing, crisis intervention and conflict resolution, and appropriately engaging with minority groups. A report found that departments that adopted such policies had lessened police-involved killings by 38%.

To address issues with disciplining police officers can be done with short-term solutions. This includes not allowing officers who have resigned or been fired because of misconduct to be rehired in law enforcement and restructuring civilian payouts, which would address the problem of qualified immunity. However, the best way to eliminate police brutality is to reduce policing in the long term. First, this means ‘carving off pieces’ of what law enforcement agencies currently do, which they may not handle well and give them to more appropriate agencies. Mental health intervention teams should be called in cases where people are dealing with homelessness, drug abuse, and mental illnesses. For example, in Denver, Colorado, the Support Team Assistance Response (STAR) program was launched, which redirects emergency calls to mental and physical health care professionals instead of the police. The success of the program is denoted through the 748 calls the STAR team has responded to; none have escalated to violence or arrest.

Second, Broken Window-style policing should be replaced by community policing in affected neighbourhoods. This means communities, instead of being flooded by police enforcement, should be flooded with social welfare programs. The research found investing in affected communities was linked to a decline in crime rate as an additional ten organizations in a city of 100,000 people correlated to a 9% drop in the murder rate and a 6% drop in the violent crime rate.

Finally, instead of allowing police to discipline themselves, civilian oversight structures should be adopted. This means a Civilian Complaints Office should be established, which would receive, investigate, and solve complaints quickly, have access to police files, and make disciplinary recommendations. A study found that police departments with civilian oversight were more likely to find meritorious complaints rather than discharging them without consequence. The problem of police brutality cannot be shied away just because it is difficult to address. There are viable solutions to addressing police brutality if we are willing to adopt long-term strategies.