Black Lives Matter and Police Brutality: Systemic Racism Reform
This paper examines police brutality and systemic racism in the United States against the backdrop of George Floyd's murder on May 25, 2020, and the global unrest it ignited. Drawing on literature from public administration, law, and public health, the paper traces the historical and institutional roots of systemic racism, analyzes data on racially disproportionate police shootings, and assesses the mental and physical health consequences borne by minority communities. The paper evaluates proposed reforms from organizations such as the American Medical Association, reviews law enforcement training initiatives, and offers unconventional recommendations—including literary education tools—to foster genuine empathy among officers. The conclusion calls for conciliatory, evidence-based responses from public administrators at all levels.
- Introduction: Floyd's death and BLM's national significance
- Background on the Issue: Context of racial tension before and after Floyd
- The Importance of Police Brutality and Systemic Racism: Health impacts and data on disproportionate force
- Discussion of Possible Solutions: AMA initiatives and law enforcement training proposals
- Recommendations for Action: Literary empathy tools and partnership strategies
- Conclusion: Call for empathy-based, evidence-driven policing reform
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What makes this paper effective
- It grounds abstract discussions of systemic racism in concrete data, citing police shooting statistics broken down by race per one million people, which makes the disparity argument measurable and hard to dismiss.
- It draws on an unusually diverse range of authoritative sources—medical (AMA policy statements), legal (Fordham Urban Law Journal), sociological, and journalistic—lending cross-disciplinary credibility to its argument.
- The recommendations section moves beyond predictable policy prescriptions by suggesting literary texts such as Black Like Me and Invisible Man as empathy-building tools, demonstrating creative problem-solving within an academic framework.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper employs a policy analysis structure: it establishes the problem's scope and historical context, quantifies its impact, surveys existing institutional responses, and then critiques those responses before proposing improvements. This move-from-diagnosis-to-prescription structure is a hallmark of strong public administration writing and helps the reader follow the argument logically from evidence to recommendation.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with an introduction that contextualizes Floyd's death within broader civil rights history, then provides historical background on racial tension. A substantial middle section presents statistical and public health evidence of disparity, drawing heavily on AMA policy documents. The solutions section honestly critiques the vagueness of institutional responses before the recommendations section offers specific, actionable alternatives. The conclusion synthesizes findings without introducing new claims, which is appropriate for the genre.
Introduction
The death of George Floyd on May 25, 2020 shocked most Americans—but especially white Americans who believed that the battle for civil rights was long over and that Black people had won (Tamkin, 2020). This complacency was shattered, however, by the massive nationwide and then global response to Floyd's death, which underscored just how severe racial tensions in the United States remained. Despite decades of aggressive state and federal efforts to ensure that all Americans are afforded their Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment rights, scarcely a day goes by without headlines reporting yet another high-profile instance of police brutality against a minority member in the United States.
These issues have assumed even greater importance in light of the Black Lives Matter movement and the numerous concerns that this and similarly situated groups have identified as part of a larger systemic racism problem. The purpose of this paper is to review the relevant literature to provide background on this issue and explain why it is important. In addition, the paper presents a discussion of possible solutions, followed by recommendations for action by civic leaders and law enforcement organizations across the country. Finally, a summary of the research and key findings concerning solutions for addressing police brutality in the United States are presented in the conclusion.
Background on the Issue
The country was already reeling from the Covid-19 pandemic—and people were suffering from the unprecedented effects of a nationwide shutdown—when the gruesome images of a police officer kneeling on the neck of George Floyd on May 25, 2020 galvanized the nation's, and then the entire world's, attention. Like the images of the terrorist-flown jets crashing into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, the news coverage of Floyd's death assumed center stage in the national consciousness despite the ongoing pandemic. As Harris (2020) recounts, "[Floyd's] murder was yet another recent murder of a Black person by a police officer in the United States, and historically, one of countless other murders of Black people committed by White people [and] his murder ignited protests and rioting in Minneapolis" (p. 383).
These protests were followed by dozens, and then hundreds, of additional demonstrations by citizens outraged by yet another Black death at the hands of law enforcement. Many observers questioned whether the outcome would have been dramatically different had Floyd been white. The initial responses to his death reflected the extent to which many people felt violated by the actions of the Minneapolis Police Department. As Harris (2020) points out, "Calls for justice and peace were made against a backdrop of buildings on fire, a police station being stormed and overtaken, stores being looted and chaos spreading from our supposedly peaceful Midwestern city to other parts of the country and even the world" (p. 384).
It is important to note, however, that Floyd's death was merely the fuse being lit on an already smoldering powder keg of racial tension (Crawford, 2018). When the initial response had played out and the Floyd incident—along with similar cases—was investigated in greater detail, calls for justice and for addressing police brutality and systemic racism began coming from a growing number of mainstream organizations, including the American Medical Association (AMA), which convened a special meeting of its House of Delegates to raise public awareness and formulate potential alternatives for moving forward.
The consensus that emerged from that special AMA meeting underscored the fact that systematic racism in the United States is the product of longstanding public and private sector institutional policies, as well as a lack of adequate training for law enforcement authorities. A press release from the AMA noted that it "recognized the detrimental public health consequences of violent law enforcement interactions in adopted policy addressing the need for policing reform [which] recognizes police brutality as a manifestation of structural racism" (AMA policy recognizes police brutality as product of structural racism, 2020, para. 4).
While the AMA is only one organization—albeit a large and influential one—the calls for action that resulted from its special meeting provide a valuable framework for evaluating current efforts and determining whether they are achieving their intended outcomes. As the research that follows will show, the numbers of police shootings of members of American minority groups have steadily escalated in recent years, and these trends have exacted a serious toll on the nation's race relations and social stability.
References
AMA policy recognizes police brutality as product of structural racism. (2020). American Medical Association. Retrieved from https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/press-releases/ama-policy-recognizes-police-brutality-product-structural-racism
Crawford, M. D. (2018, Fall). Black rage in New Orleans: Police brutality and African American activism from World War II to Hurricane Katrina. The Western Journal of Black Studies, 36(3), 249–255.
Dutcher, T. (2020, July). Killing with prejudice: Institutionalized racism in American capital punishment. Theory in Action, 13(3), 148–151.
Harris, S. M. (2020, July). Black Lives Matter to systemic family therapists. Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 46(3), 383.
Lawson, T. (2013, Spring). Powerless against police brutality: A felon's story. St. Thomas Law Review, 25(2), 218–222.
Mathews, A. (2020, January 1). Racialized youth in the public library: Systemic racism through a critical theory lens. Partnership: The Canadian Journal of Library and Information Practice and Research, 15(1), 1.
McCarthy, N. (2020, July 15). U.S. police shootings: Blacks disproportionately affected. Statista. Retrieved from https://www.statista.com/chart/21857/people-killed-in-police-shootings-in-the-us/
Panwala, A. S. (2009, January). The failure of local and federal prosecutors to curb police brutality. Fordham Urban Law Journal, 30(2), 639–642.
Tamkin, E. (2020, June 5). The fires keep burning: How the killing by police of George Floyd convulsed the United States. New Statesman, 149(5523), 28–31.
Wood, S. (2020, July 9). Universities plan fall initiatives to address systemic racism and police brutality. Diverse Issues in Higher Education, 37(10), 7.
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