The US has witnessed her fair share of controversial police activities. As a civilian force mandated to uphold and enforce the law to protect citizen civil rights, complaints have continued to be voiced over unwarranted use of force on civilians by the police (Flatow, 2014). Such acts of outright violence have been questions and despite the efforts to reform the force civil rights groups and the media continue to raise concerns of an increasingly aggressive police department. According to Flatow (2014), police brutality in context refers to the expressive violence police officers subject suspects either through assault, torture, intimidation, and sometimes murder. The mistreatment in the hands of a force mandated to protect and uphold civil rights has left affected communities uncertain of how to relate with their local police departments in fear of mistreatment (Flatow, 2014). Nicole Flatow’s article is one such piece of literature that has captured police brutality from a socio-historical perspective.
Nicole Flatow adopts an objective analysis of the topic of police brutality through historical timelines. In her article, she sets out to define police brutality highlighting the key aspects such as police power and use of force. The article’s perspective offers hindsight on abuse of power by police officers through examining the policies that allow the use of force and to what level officers of the law have arbitrarily exceeded what is allowable within the margins of law enforcement. Flatow’s article emphasizes the need to have regulatory aspects on what would be a permissible force within the confines of civilian order and what exceeds a level that would be regarded as brutality.
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Research methodologies differ depending on the objectives a researcher sets in their study. Flatow’s article is qualitative research that has used archival analysis to capture both context and secondary data on police brutality. Archival analysis as a methodology relies on the use of already existing information to form the basis of an argument and justify various study objectives. Police brutality, as outlined in the article, is a practice that has persisted over the years and, to an extent, has followed a systematic trend in an administration. The trend involves the enactment of policies. Key issues that Flatow raise in her article include the militarization of police force that was started by major towns and district units such as Los Angeles and New York states and ethnic profiling. All these key aspects of police brutality are documented across materials analyzed by Flatow.
Flatow’s article contributes significantly to the literature on policies and civil rights topics. As a focus area, police brutality remains a governance issue, and as policy dynamics change, decision making would require inferences made from objective scholarly material. Nicole’s article offers such objective as it never dwells on the police actions but examines the existing problem from a multi-faceted approach that not only highlights the impending need to change the social perspective of the police but implement policies that would reverse the damaged relationship between the police and the civilian population.
Flatow employs a deliberate methodology that helps in contextualizing various cases of perceived violence on suspects that led to social disorder. While at it, the choice of an analytic approach using secondary data helps highlight the various flaws in social fabric not only with the police but with the existing relationships that are at the core of establishing peace. The approach used by Nicole makes sense as historical backgrounds on social issues allow audiences to form and interpret contexts rather than form opinions based on biased views. The author appropriately employs the method as she not only use them to build up the arguments in the article but further uses them as supporting reference in the article conclusions. There are no errors in the article as the author appropriately acknowledges sources of the original information as required in secondary data analytical studies.
References
Flatow, N. (2014). " What Has Changed About Police Brutality in America, from Rodney King to Michael Brown ," thinkprogress.org. https://thinkprogress.org/what-has-changed-about-police-brutality-in-america-from-rodney-king-to-michael-brown-e6b29a2feff8/
