Please revisit your Workshop thread and add to or refine your research problem and purpose statement process. Add other comments that summarize the development of your research ideas.
PLEASE SEE WEEK 2 POSTING BELOW. Add to it. please highlight whatever parts you added. See the week 2 posting below for the topic
Police Brutality against African American Males
The recent widely publicized tragic deaths of African Americans at the hands of the police has generated a public debate about racism in policing. A lot of research has been conducted to identify and understand the perception of the African Americans about the police and the consequences of racial inequalities on policing (Brunson, 2017). Unfortunately, limited research has been conducted to investigate the institutional and personal influences of non-African Americans police officers on how they treat African Americans. Furthermore, more research has to be done to understand the history of policing, to identify if there are practices within the force that motivate officers to engage in unethical behavior against racial minorities (Brunson, 2017). The aim of this research paper is to investigate the literature gaps on the effects of perceptions non-African American officers have on how they deal with African American arrests. The main research problem is the identification of factors that make African American males targets of police brutality. The purpose of this research is to identify and to attempt to identify the factors motivating the police to be brutal and violent against African American males. While the perception of racial minorities towards the police remain to be that of untrustworthy and bias force, this research would also attempt to determine the perceptions that the police have towards African American males, and why their arrest is different from that of normal white people.
To obtain accurate and honest information from the police force, the data collection methods would involve questionnaires and surveys where the respondents would not have to reveal their identities (Chaney & Robertson, 2013). The research questions include, what indicates that an African American male is a criminal? When moving to make an arrest, do you follow the correct procedure for arrests, or do you let your emotions guide you? The data collection methodology would still stand to gain trust of the police and gather correct information on their perception of African American males.
The main challenges faced when developing a research problem was that there is a common knowledge that racism and criminalizing African Americans was the main reason behind police brutality and therefore, there is a high possibility that most of the police officers would cite this as the main reason (Chaney & Robertson, 2013). The research aims at uncovering the emotions and behavioral changes that occur when police officers arrest and convict African American males. The research results would then be connected to the results on the history of policing to identify patterns.
References
Brunson, R. K. (2017). Police don’t like black people: AfricanAmerican young men’s accumulated police experiences. Criminology & public policy, 6(1), 71-101.
Chaney, C., & Robertson, R. V. (2013). Racism and police brutality in America. Journal of African American Studies, 17(4), 480-505.
