Police brutality is the excessive and unwarranted use of force by law enforcement. It is an extreme form of police misconduct or violence and is a civil rights violation. It also refers to a situation where officers exercise undue or excessive force against a person.
Police violence includes but is not limited to physical or verbal harassment, physical or mental injury, property damage, the inaction of police officers, and in some cases, death. In the
United States, qualified immunity is a legal doctrine used to protect officers from litigation after incidents of
police violence. This law was issued by the Supreme Court in 1982. In recent years, particularly since the fatal shooting
… Read more of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014,
police brutality has become a hot-button issue in the
United States. Police officers in America are killing around 1,000 people every single year.
The
Black Lives Matter Movement, formed in 2013, has been a vocal part of the movement against
police brutality in the U.S. by organizing ?die-ins?, marches, and demonstrations in response to the killings of black men and women by police.
While
Black Lives Matter has become a controversial movement within the U.S., it has brought more attention to the number and frequency of police shootings of civilians.
A
police state describes a state where its
government institutions exercise an extreme level of control over civil
society and liberties characterized by the overbearing presence of civil authorities. A
police state typically exhibits elements of totalitarianism and authoritarian regimes. The best-known literary treatment of the
police state is
George Orwell's novel
1984, which describes Britain under a totalitarian régime that continuously invokes (and feeds) a perpetual
war as a pretext for subjecting
the people to mass surveillance, policing, and modification of language and the way people
think in order to make dissent not only swiftly punished, but also grammatically and logically
… Read more impossible to conceive and express. The state destroys not only the literal
freedom after action and thought meant by expressions like "
freedom of thought", but also literal
freedom of thought.
Printed in USA
