Subject Guides: Black Lives Matter: Police Brutality

Definition - Reference Resources

"Police brutality tends to occur in situations where the police take it upon themselves, or are encouraged to act independently as if they were a governing body, bypassing other elements in the criminal justice system to administer punishment as they see fit."

Chevigny, P. G. (2008). Police brutality. In L. R. Kurtz (Ed.), Encyclopedia of violence, peace and conflict (2nd ed.). Elsevier Science & Technology. Credo Reference: https://muhlenberg.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://search.credoreference.com/content/entry/estpeace/police_brutality/0?institutionId=4200

Credo Reference
Explore other disciplinary perspectives including those from the Encyclopedia of African American Society, Global Social Issues: An Encyclopedia, and Contemporary World Issues.

Relevant Databases

The Counted
"The Counted is a project by the Guardian – and you – working to count the number of people killed by police and other law enforcement agencies in the United States throughout 2015 and 2016, to monitor their demographics and to tell the stories of how they died.

The database will combine Guardian reporting with verified crowdsourced information to build a more comprehensive record of such fatalities. The Counted is the most thorough public accounting for deadly use of force in the US, but it will operate as an imperfect work in progress – and will be updated by Guardian reporters and interactive journalists as frequently and as promptly as possible."
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.

We believe the data represented on this site is the most comprehensive accounting of people killed by police since 2013. A recent report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics estimated approximately 1,200 people were killed by police between June, 2015 and May, 2016. Our database identified 1,106 people killed by police over this time period. While there are undoubtedly police killings that are not included in our database (namely, those that go unreported by the media), these estimates suggest that our database captures 92% of the total number of police killings that have occurred since 2013. We hope these data will be used to provide greater transparency and accountability for police departments as part of the ongoing campaign to end police violence in our communities."
Police Data Accessibility Project
"We use public data to document our police systems.
Our community collects data about legal systems because their power to impact people demands a higher degree of oversight."

HeinOnline
Fully searchable government document and legal research database. It contains comprehensive coverage from inception of U.S. statutory materials, U.S. Congressional Documents and more than 2,600 scholarly journals.
HeinOnline provides topic specific databases including all of the world's constitutions, all U.S. treaties, collections of classic treatises and presidential documents, Criminal Justice, Religion and the Law, and Women and the Law among others. Full text of state and federal case law powered by Fastcase,

Relevant Websites

Citizen Police Data Project
"CPDP takes records of police interactions with the public – records that would otherwise be buried in internal databases – and opens them up to make the data useful to the public, creating a permanent record for every CPD police officer."
George Floyd Justice In Policing Act
Passed by the House of Representatives on June 25, 2020.

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Press release available: https://bass.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/house-passes-george-floyd-justice-policing-act
Oversight Hearing on Policing Practices and Law Enforcement Accountability
Date: Wednesday, June 10, 2020 - 10:00am
Task Force on 21st Century Policing
"The President's Task Force on 21st Century Policing was created by an executive order signed by United States President Barack Obama on December 18, 2014. Obama created it in response to the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri following the shooting of Michael Brown by a police officer there."

Black Lives Matter

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