Police Brutality In America, From Rodney King To Michael Brown
Amadou Diallo. Rodney King. Timothy Thomas. Looking at where we are today in the weeks after the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, it can feel like nothing has changed in the way we police the police.
Many things haven’t. Juries acquitted police. Cops got their jobs back. And brutality happened again.
Some things have gotten worse. Like police militarization.
But some things have gotten better, or are still moving toward reform in the wake of a prominent brutality incident. A history of these incidents reveals that some major recent police reforms got their start after highly publicized episodes of police violence. But it was only after years or decades and dogged, persistent community-building that some progress started to manifest."
* Los Angeles was the original militarizer of police, even before the federal government started handing out left-over or used weapons, and before the height of the War on Drugs.
“The LAPD was the godfather of that kind of militaristic response,”
*And police accountability remains one of the most sticky problems. A 2008 Cincinnati Enquirer review found that while 35 police officers were fired over a 20-year period, 19 of the 25 who appealed the decision to an arbitrator got their jobs back, "
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2014/09/11/3477520/whats-changed-and-what-hasnt-in-policing-the-police/
