LibGuides: African American History: Police Brutality & Discrimination in the Criminal Justice System

Police Brutality

screenshot from Mapping Police Violence, showing that "there were 15 days in 2021 when police did not kill people in the US" The image here, taken from the website Mapping Police Violence, shows the problem of police violence in the last year alone. According to the research collected "Black people are 2.9 times more likely to be killed by police than white people in the U.S," (2)

Click on the tabs in this box to find videos, podcasts, articles from the web, and the library's collection, as well as links or organizations whose websites feature articles, images, data, and statistics like the one featured here.

(click on image to enlarge | Image cited below)

Mapping Police Violence
"This information has been meticulously sourced from the three largest, most comprehensive and impartial crowdsourced databases on police killings in the country: FatalEncounters.org, the U.S. Police Shootings Database and KilledbyPolice.net. We've also done extensive original research to further improve the quality and completeness of the data; searching social media, obituaries, criminal records databases, police reports and other sources to identify the race of 90 percent of all victims in the database."

Police Brutality

Websites & Organizations

ACLU: Police Excessive Force
Part of the Criminal Justice Law Reform Project, find info on Police Excessive Force, Police Corruption, Asset Forfeiture Abuse, Police Militarization, Search and Seizure, and more
Amnesty International: Police Violence
Black Lives Matter (website)
"Black Lives Matter Foundation, Inc is a global organization in the US, UK, and Canada, whose mission is to eradicate white supremacy and build local power to intervene in violence inflicted on Black communities by the state and vigilantes."
Campaign Zero
Campaign Zero is a project of the non-profit
that...supports "the analysis of policing practices across the country, research to identify effective solutions to end police violence, technical assistance to organizers leading police accountability campaigns and the development of model legislation and advocacy to end police violence nationwide"
Center for Policing Equity
"The Center for Policing Equity is a research center founded at University of California-Los Angeles and now based at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice."
Congress and Police Reform: Current Law and Recent Proposals
Government reports with Current law change proposals and other legal documents
Department of Justice: Law Enforcement
Equal Justice Initiative
The Equal Justice Initiative is committed to ending mass incarceration and excessive punishment in the United States, to challenging racial and economic injustice, and to protecting basic human rights for the most vulnerable people in American society.
Law Enforcement Accountability Project
"The goal of LEAP is to elevate activist storytelling around police brutality and murder through funding short-term projects in film, theater, photography, fine art, music, poetry, literature, sculpture and dance. Change begins with the stories we tell each other about the police and Black people."
Mapping Police Violence
"This information has been meticulously sourced from the three largest, most comprehensive and impartial crowdsourced databases on police killings in the country: FatalEncounters.org, the U.S. Police Shootings Database and KilledbyPolice.net. We've also done extensive original research to further improve the quality and completeness of the data; searching social media, obituaries, criminal records databases, police reports and other sources to identify the race of 90 percent of all victims in the database."
The Marshall Project
The Marshall Project is a nonpartisan, nonprofit news organization that seeks to create and sustain a sense of national urgency about the U.S. criminal justice system. We achieve this through award-winning journalism, partnerships with other news outlets and public forums. In all of our work we strive to educate and enlarge the audience of people who care about the state of criminal justice.
National Law Enforcement Museum: Black Trailblazers in Blue
A collection of posts from the National Law Enforcement Museum
The Sentencing Project
"Mission: The Sentencing Project works for a fair and effective U.S. criminal justice system by producing groundbreaking research to promote reforms in sentencing policy, address unjust racial disparities and practices, and to advocate for alternatives to incarceration."
Stop Police Brutality Now
"The purpose of our STOP Police Brutality Now initiative is to gather reports of credible allegations of police misconduct so policymakers (and others) can make informed assessments regarding the nature and circumstances of police misconduct, and consider proposals that can minimize wrongdoing."

Police Brutality

Articles & Online Collections

Background Articles

History and Oppressive Police Practices against Minorities a 2019 article from The State of American Policing: Psychology, Behavior, Problems, and Solutions
Police Brutality a 2014 article from Race and Racism in the United States: An Encyclopedia of the American Mosaic
Police Corruption Article from Crime and Punishment in America: An Encyclopedia of Trends and Controversies in the Justice System (Vol. 2. )
Police Corruption and Misconduct Subject Encyclopedia Article from Gale Virtual Reference Library/ Gale eBooks
Police Deviance a 2014 article from the Encyclopedia of Social Deviance
Police Violence A 2020 article from Violence in American Society: An Encyclopedia of Trends, Problems, and Perspectives
Race and Ethnicity (in the CJ System) A 2005 article from Crime and Punishment in America Reference Library
The Slave Patrols: The Role of Slavery in the Formation of American Policing (1700s–Present) A 2021 article from Law Enforcement in America

Articles from Popular, Scholarly, and Web Resources

#BlackLivesMatter Surges on Twitter after George Floyd’s Death
From Pew Researcher
10 things we know about race and policing in the U.S.
From Pew Research Center
Emmett and Trayvon
A 2013 article from Washington Monthly
The History of Policing And Race In The U.S. Are Deeply Intertwined
A 2019 article/6 minute listen, All Things Considered, from NPR
How an Anti-Lynching Banner From the 1920s and ‘30s Is Being Updated to Protest Modern-Day Violence
A news article from the Smithsonian Magazine
How the Media Covered Police Brutality Three Decades Ago
A 2021 article from JSTOR Daily
Police and the Community: Pew Research Center
The Origins of Modern Day Policing
An article from the NAACP

Police Brutality

Featured Podcasts & Audio

American Police - Throughline (podcast)
a hour long episiode of NPR's Throughline, 2020

More coming soon!

Source citations:

(1) Mapping Police Violence. (n.d.). [Calendar view of police killings in 2021] [Infographic]. Mapping Police Violence. https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/ ?year=2021&location=the+U.S.&type=people&chart=Calendar

(2) Mapping Police Violence. (n.d.). Police killings per 1 million people in the U.S., 2013–2022 [Chart]. Mapping Police Violence. https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/ ?year=2021&location=the+U.S.&type=people&chart=RateByRace

Holman Library

African American History

Police Brutality

Police Brutality

Police Brutality

Police Brutality

Websites & Organizations

Police Brutality

Articles & Online Collections

Background Articles

Articles from Popular, Scholarly, and Web Resources

Police Brutality

Featured Videos

Police Brutality

Featured Podcasts & Audio