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

Police Brutality

Pulled Over: How Police Stops Define Race and Citizenship

Main Collection

book cover for "Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect?:"

Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect?: Police Violence and Resistance in the United States

Main Collection & Ebook (Ebook Central)

Policing the Black Man: Arrest, Prosecution, and Imprisonment

Main Collection

book cover for "Police Deviance and Criminality"

Police Deviance and Criminality : Managing Integrity and Accountability

Book cover for "Today's Police and Sheriff Recruits"

Today's Police and Sheriff Recruits: Insights from the Newest Members of America's Law Enforcement Community

Ebsco Academic ebook Collectoin

Hunting for Dirtbags : Why Cops Over-Police the Poor and Racial Minorities

Policing the Planet : Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter

Main Collection

World Encyclopedia of Police Forces and Correctional Systems

Click on the tabs in the box below 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.

Police Brutality

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 2.8 times more likely to be killed by police than white people in the U.S," (1)

(click on image to enlarge)

Calendar view of police killings in 2024 [Infographic]. https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/

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 and 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.
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."

Police Brutality

Articles and Online Collections

Background Articles

Articles from Popular, Scholarly, and Web Resources

Views of Race, Policing and Black Lives Matter in the 5 Years Since George Floyd’s Killing
From the Pew Research Center, 2025.
10 things we know about race and policing in the U.S.
From Pew Research Center
Emmett and Trayvon: How Racial Prejudice Has Changed in the Last 60 Years
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
Trust in America: Do Americans Trust the Police?
From the Pew Research Center, 2022.
Police and the Community: Pew Research Center
The Origins of Modern Day Policing
An article from the NAACP

Police Brutality

Featured Podcasts and Audio

American Police - Throughline (podcast)
a hour long episiode of NPR's Throughline, 2020
NPR Podcasts Tackling Race, Injustice, and Police Brutality
List compiled by Podchaser.

More coming soon!

Source citations:

(1) Mapping Police Violence. (n.d.). Police killings per 1 million people in the U.S., 2013–2025 [Chart]. Mapping Police Violence. Map showing the number of people in each U.S. state killed by police, so far this year. https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/

Holman Library

African American History

Police Brutality

Pulled Over: How Police Stops Define Race and Citizenship

Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect?: Police Violence and Resistance in the United States

Policing the Black Man: Arrest, Prosecution, and Imprisonment

Police Deviance and Criminality : Managing Integrity and Accountability

Today's Police and Sheriff Recruits: Insights from the Newest Members of America's Law Enforcement Community

Hunting for Dirtbags : Why Cops Over-Police the Poor and Racial Minorities

Policing the Planet : Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter

World Encyclopedia of Police Forces and Correctional Systems

Police Brutality

Police Brutality

Police Brutality

Websites and Organizations

Police Brutality

Articles and Online Collections

Background Articles

Articles from Popular, Scholarly, and Web Resources

Police Brutality

Featured Videos

Police Brutality

Featured Podcasts and Audio