Police brutality has become such a big problem in the past few years. It's not necessarily because there has been more of it, but because more people are hearing about the events that are taking place. Most of the stories that are on the news and get heard about by everyone are the ones in which African Americans are being mistreated. Most of the African Americans being harmed are either young adults or younger. This affects me because I am an African American and I never know when something bad could happen to me or someone close to me. I have not witnessed anyone being harassed personally, and I pray that I never do. 

My first article is about how African Americans feel they have been treated. Statistics are included throughout the story to represent what people feel. Three out of every five blacks say that they have been mistreated the police because of their race. This is the majority of the blacks in the United States. In the article a man by the name of Larry Washington tells his story of when he was a teenager. He was arrested for theft and when his arresting officer got him to the police station he told him "he looked like he wanted to do something about it" & kept calling him out of his name. This is not okay but there was nothing that Mr. Washington could really do about it at the time being. From this data in this article, it also shows that whites don't feel the same way about police brutality the way that African Americans do. This is mainly because they don't experience the same things that African Americans do, simply because they are not black.  This article comes from the Denver Post, and is written by the associated press. Since their job is to post articles then it is neither bias or non biased. This is just an article stating statistics and sharing stories.  

 No one knows how many times African Americans were brutalized by the police this past year. This article tells us that, as of June 2015, that almost 30 percent of African Americans were killed in that year. Also, a story of brutality to teenagers was told. Some blacks were seen at a neighborhood pool and someone called the police on them, the police came and started pointing his gun at the unarmed teenagers, tackling one of the girls. No one was shot or killed but the police did not take care of the situation how it should have been taken care of. He automatically assumed that the children were at the pool being disorderly, when they were only there for a pool party. The author, Peniel Joseph, thinks this is awful and there should be an end to this police brutality. Peniel Joseph is a professor of History and founding director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at Tufts University. He is very knowledgeable about the information reported in the article and his credentials makes him reliable. 

In my final article it is about the racial act of the police department in Prince George's County.  The story of how a black, very educated man was killed a police in this county.  A man by the name of Prince Jones, was found a few blocks from his home bent over his Jeep's steering wheel with four bullets in his back. This specific killing was reported as a surveillance operation gone bad. The police officers were trailing him, because they were looking to bust another man.  There was no way that the police could have thought that Mr. Jones was the other guy because the guy the police were looking for had way different qualities then Mr. Jones.  Mr. Jones was 6-foot-4 , slender, with a short cut while the guy the police were looking for was  stocky, 5-foot-6, and had dreadlocks. This is evident that the police only killed Mr. Jones because of his race, because there is no other explanation to why this would even be acceptable. The author of the story, Ta-Nehisi Coates, is a writer and journalist, particularly writing about African Americans. He attended Howard university for five years then stopping to become a journalist.  He has also written two books.  Seeing as though, his dad grew up as a Black Panther then Coates was able to learn things from him about African Americans at a young age.  This making him creditable to write about the treatment of blacks, especially because he is African American.

Even though African Americans face brutality the most, the research question is arguable because whites are also going to find a way to say its not all about race. In all the stories mentioned here, all of the people being mistreated are African American. I agree with every single one of these stories, that police brutality is horrible and needs to be stopped. The different perspectives of the sources just cause me to see even more that us, African Americans, are being killed or wounded just because of our skin color. I believe that African Americans are also targeted too because of our lack of knowledge with the criminal justice system. I think that the police know that we barely know our rights and what the police can and cannot do, especially younger children. I may need to revise my research question by making it about the mistreatment of African Americans, rather than excessive force. By doing this, it will make it about all the mistreatments blacks have experienced instead of just the use of force, since the first article didn't involve excessive force.

