Bell was unarmed, yet the officers fired more than 50 shots into his car" (2007, p. 46). Following a grand jury investigation of the incident, three of the five detectives who were involved were charged for the shooting (Mayer, 2007). According to Mayer, "The incident is reminiscent of a similar situation in New York in 1999, in which a West African street vendor, Amadou Diallo, was killed when police shot at him 41 times. Diallo was also unarmed" (2007, p. 46). The fact that these events occurred almost a decade apart and were unrelated was not the primary focus of the media coverage that attended them, and it is reasonable to assume that sensationalized media coverage of these and other instances of police brutality simply reinforce the perception in the minds of the American public that the police are out of control.
All of this is not to say, of course, that police officers never engage in acts of brutality and the use of excessive force, but it is to say that little attention is paid to the millions of police-citizen encounters that take place every year in the United States where law enforcement authorities would be justified in using force -- even deadly force -- but refrain from doing so at their own personal risk based on their high regard for citizens' rights and the sanctity of human life. This precise point is made by Elicker (2008) who emphasizes that the statistics bear out just how restrained the police departments across the country are in their use of force at all. According to Elicker, "Despite the way mass media presents the subject of police brutality, the occurrences of police use of force cases are not all that common" (2008, p. 33).
Citing...
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