Cycles of racial violence: police brutality in the 1990s

This thesis combines theoretical and practical reasoning behind police brutality and draws on methodologies and frameworks from a range of academic disciplines, including psychology, sociology, and politics. It bridges the gap in the current academic literature around police brutality by showing that implicit bias, training and weaponry culminate in the reasoning behind the cycle of police abuse. It shows that there is an ongoing Black Freedom Struggle and that it is not justifiable to assume that the Civil Rights Movement ended in the 1960s as the battles are the same, not only from the 1960s to the 1990s but to the contemporary too, whereby legislation still needs to change in order to prevent unnecessary killings of unarmed African Americans. Police brutality is one of the most deadly affects on African Americans and the thesis proves that implicit bias, the lack of adequate training and the weaponry used by police, both individually and when combined, are direct causes of overzealous policing, and will present arguments to resolve the ongoing battle between police and unarmed African Americans.

Chapter One analyses the effect of implicit bias on the police and shows how status and class have little bearing to reduce this.

Chapter Two discusses the inadequacy of police training around the key issues of police use of force and establishes the need to adjust the current curriculum to create new methods to reduce the deaths of African Americans in the community.

The final chapter analyses the weaponry used by the police as problematic to African Americans, as they are all too readily used.

These three key elements are fundamental to the cycle of police brutality, which prevents the Civil Rights Movement from ending and this analysis will resolve at least some of the issues which arise from their affect on policing.