Police brutality

The process of recasting and relabeling social issues as Black problems, regardless of the established facts or findings, could be called empirical perversion. Debates about affirmative action, welfare, and crime fell prey to this game of radical twister. The same phenomenon is at work in the framing of police brutality. What was once a generic term used to describe police abuse against citizens has come to symbolize a confrontation between members of minority communities and the police. Simply put, the public face of a police brutality victim is that of a young man who is Black or Latino. This racial links is the direct result of the disproportionately high number of Blacks and Latinos who have been assaulted by the police. Blacks report much higher rates of encounters with the police. For example, a 1997 household survey by the Justice Department found that Blacks and Hispanics were about 70 percent more likely to have had contact with the police than Whites. The survey also revealed...