Why do we fear the ones who are supposed to “serve and protect us?” Beaten senseless, tased to severe injury and being shot to death has been the outcome for a number of routine traffic stops or just regular police altercations. Excessive force has been used by police officers and has left thousands of families affected, usually in the case of losing a loved one.

Not just recently has this been a problem but for an ongoing number of years. Not because we just now started seeing mass media coverage on these police shootings and killings of unarmed citizens means it hasn’t been a serious epidemic. Even before Rodney King and decades after his case, there has been an issue with police brutality. Some of these certain select of citizens have lost a sense of safety from the police or felt like they never had it in the first place.

Let’s be clear, not all police officers have negative intentions, but it’s time to start holding the ones who do accountable for their actions. Many times police officers have killed an unarmed citizen and got away with it, and even when consequences come to play it’s an indictment or charge with a light sentence or even simply just a loss of their job. Police brutality is an epidemic in America and can be fixed with media coverage, less prejudice for officers in the force, proper and more advanced training, as well as harsher sentences when an unarmed citizen is injured or killed by excessive force. Sadly, these occurrences are becoming more and more common.

Anyone can be affected by police brutality, whether it be your race, age or gender, but there tends to be a trend in the cases of police brutality we see. The victims are usually black males around the ages from 17-56, even dipping as low as 12 year olds. The statistics are scary for this because it shows how much prejudice there is among officers. In fact, according to the New York Times, black men were 3.5 times more likely to be killed by cops than white men. Black males from the ages 15 to 19 are 21 times more likely to be killed by police than white males in that age group and in the year 2015, unarmed black men were seven times more likely to be killed by police than unarmed white men (Rosenthal, 2015).

We should not have to live in a world where we fear the ones who are supposed to protect us. Not all police officers are bad, but police brutality and misconduct has become too much of an epidemic for there not to be a change. For the future there can be a solution all through mass media coverage, less prejudice for officers in the force, proper and more advanced training, as well as harsher sentences when an unarmed citizen is injured or killed by excessive force.