Police Brutality In The Civil Rights Era

Police departments across the country too often use excessive force, injuring people suspected of crimes or even creating crimes against Blacks like Jim Crow Laws and occasionally killing them like in Rodney King’s death. Members of minority groups and the poor are frequently the victims of police brutality, which law enforcement agencies try to cover up. Police departments must shed their cover-up culture and institute reforms, such as strengthening civilian oversight boards, which can investigate and prevent incidents of police brutality. In the past, those who involved themselves in police violence may have represented with the unexpressed approval of the local legal system throughout the Civil Rights era. In the modern era, individuals
who engage in police brutality may do so with the unspoken approval of their superiors or they may be mischief officers. In either case, they may sanction their actions under color of law and, more often than not, take part in a successive cover-up of their illegal activity.
In the beginning the Jim Crow system of segregation in the South not only downgraded Blacks to second-class citizens for whom voting, education, and housing rights were constrained; it also deprived Blacks sufficient government protection from the racial violence employed to preserve this social order classification as the “status quo”.
Colored codes, racist statutes, and government unwillingness to protect Blacks from imminent racial ferocity allowed members of the Ku Klux Klan to carry out terrible action with immunity. Since local officials were not interested in acting against white-on-black violence, police officers could also evade liability for abusing the civil rights of Black residents. “Lynching was accepted as a method of imposing law and order in the South and sustaining a social caste system. An anti-lynching movement was gradually legitimized and supported by the NAACP through legal challenges, but the law continued to criminalize Black behavior” (Civilrights.org). In the early years of the Civil Rights Division, felonious cases were constricted in amount and had inadequate effect. While the Division had the statutory power to take legal action against police brutality, the legal structures in the South were not equipped to work
together.
In spite of Jim Crow Laws, the beating of Rodney King by officers apprehended on videotape and broadcast around the world, traumatized America. The tape all but confirmed the officers' use of excessive force and uncovered to the public long-lasting racial tensions. “The state prosecution of the four officers involved caused in a complete exoneration” (history.com). Within hours, rebellions broke out that left people dead and thousands wounded. “In light of what appeared too many to be an extensive failure of justice, the Civil Rights Division opened a new investigation and initiated a federal prosecution resulting in the same four officers charged with two counts of intentionally violating Mr. King's constitutional rights by the use of excessive force.” (history.com).
In the end, officers should know the extent of the law and what the can and cannot do. In their line of work there are “do’s and don’ts” and it isn’t right to use excessive force on someone just because the color of their skin. Racism remains a problem in the United States and political injustice will not help the problems we face. Police departments across the country too often use excessive force, injuring people suspected of crimes or even creating crimes against Blacks like Jim Crow Laws and occasionally killing them like in Rodney King’s death.