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POLICE BRUTALITY
WILSON

Since the range of police mistreatment is extensive, accuracy in tallying the reports is difficult. The Department of Justice, in a period, January 1, 1958 through June, 1960, tallied 1,328 reported incidents, 461 against Negroes, 117 in North and West, 344 in the South. One recent Federal study suggested that in 20 to 30 per cent of observed encounters with the law by minority group members, the minority group individual was subject to different, usually more forceful treatment at the hands of the police than were white individuals.

While quietly recognizing the nationwide character of the problem of police brutality, experts are inclined to generalize that where racial murders are not numerous and death sentences most frequent for Negroes, incidents of brutality seem to be greatest. The problem of police brutality itself has a long history, stretching back past the 1931 Wickersham Report of President Hoover's National Commission of Law Observation and Enforcement, to the studies of Arthur Raper during the 1920's. Raper found that one half of Negroes killed, North and South, by whites are killed by policemen. By decent police standards, the killing of Negroes is unnecessary. 
Thus, the present and historic treatment of black people by the police has been a basis for explosive confrontation. Inequities in law enforcement based on race, economic and political outlook are not easily documented or generally acknowledged by a number of minority groups but they are hastily denied by many white spokesmen and politicians. 

from whence does police mistreatment spring?

Police then are more than the symbols of the oppression of racial and ethnic minority groups. They are the actual first lines of the society's oppression. But the big question is from whence does the policeman's virulent hate and mistreatment spring. The policeman's behavior emerges from his own individual needs, from the example of society, and most particularly the class into which he was born and nurtured, from the department for which he works and from the public policy which determines the direction of his efforts. 
Members of the local police departments are products of this society and most frequently drawn from the ranks of the people of a particular jurisdiction. In their treatment of suspects and law violators, they are mirrors of the attitudes of their society, their class and their family background. 

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Transcription Notes:
---------- Reopened for Editing 2024-02-13 01:46:16 from whence does police mistreatment spring?(this is in bold print) ---------- Reopened for Editing 2024-02-13 08:37:45 no need to indicate bolded or italicized text according to General Instructions ---------- Reopened for Editing 2024-02-13 10:40:31