Are people scared of police brutality in USA?

39 comments

1. I’m not, but I’m not in the demographics that have valid complaints.

2. As a middle aged white lady, I am not scared of police brutality happening to me. But I am very concerned with police brutality and general cop fuckery in this country in general.

3. A lot of poor people are, especially in black neighborhoods

4. I do not fear that, but i do feel very uncomfortable around police. It has happened to people I know with one having gone on to win a lawsuit against the city.

5. As fucked up as it is, it depends a lot on your demographics.

   Like, I have bipolar disorder. My illness is totally managed, medicated, and I live a normal life, but in the event something happens and I get weird, I’ve instructed my family never to call the police because I feel like the chances of me dying go up exponentially if that happens.

   But part of the issue is our police should not have to be the ones to respond to mental health calls anyway, but we don’t have sufficient services for any other response.

6. I am less scared of police brutality in the USA than I am about police brutality outside the USA.

7. No, but I usually just try not to interact with cops or do things to get their attention.

8. I am not personally for myself. But I have an adult son with autism.

   I worry for him. If he were to have an interaction with the police while having a bad day. He has a tendency to make things up while extremely upset. He may not follow instructions. And he may move unpredictably.

9. For the vast majority of people I’ve known, it’s not a concern in the least bit. More so there was a concern over traffic tickets.

10. Depends on who and where you are. People by and large trust the police enough for them to call them to do the job, but in many places, people aren’t going to just trust a cop just because they wear a badge and will be wary of them.

    But I wouldn’t say most people are worried about police brutality despite that.

11. I’ve been harassed by police in Mexico and Aruba where they demanded “courtesy” money / bribes, or threatened me with arrest & beating.

    This hasn’t happened to me in the USA.

12. I’m not.

13. Yeah. Seattle PD are known for excessive force. The federal government has literally had SPD under federal oversight because of their excessive force.

14. It’s reciprocal.

    Brutal neighborhoods create brutal cops.

    Overwhelming majority of cops, they don’t want to be in the situations they get put in. No officer wakes up wanting to have a crummy day where they have to fight punks for resisting arrest.

    But when it happens enough times, well, you’re not special. You’re just one more and they don’t have time to put up with your bs.

15. I’m not, but if I were the type to disobey orders, resist arrest, run away when they want to talk to me, etc., I would be a lot more scared.

16. What a lot of people outside the U.S. don’t understand is “Police” is not a single entity or unit in the U.S. Every town and city has their own police department with their own specific problems, focuses, styles, mission, etc. There’s also a police department for every county and every state…we’re extremely decentralized.

    What you get is a ton of different departments operating…differently. Some of them are extremely corrupt and abuse their power (or are extremely militaristic). Some are super laid back and don’t give a damn what anyone does until others are directly harmed. Most are somewhere in between.

    Demographics and institutional/historical oppression systems play a role too. Members from a non-white, poor community in a big city are far more likely to experience police brutality than say, white middle class people in a white middle class rural town or suburb.

    There is notable concern for those with mental health issues, as MOST (not all) police departments are not well trained or versed in dealing with people with mental disabilities. That doesn’t mean all are bad…some are going to be more trained, or may have specific staff or will quickly call in a mental health institution or worker to handle the situation instead. For the most part though, those situations are going to be extremely dangerous.

    It really all depends on which departments you’re working with.

17. The areas that worry about police brutality for themselves generally have to worry about brutality from the non-police, too.

18. Nope

19. Me personally, no, not really. But for others, most definitely.

20. Kinda, most of my cop interactions were pretty normal with no issues. I have had cops throw me my ID back or yell to intimidate me when I didn’t do anything to receive that behavior. So I am cautious when I get stopped as in just do whatever they say but I don’t fear for my life.

21. I think most wealthy/middle class people that are not Black don’t fear it at all.

    Poor people and people of color? It’s a concern.

    I’ve seen it and experienced it in my family. I would never call the cops on my mentally ill brother, ever. Too dangerous.

22. Compared to other first world countries? Yes.

    Im not a racial minority but I still get a little on edge and make sure the cop sees where my hands are if im pulled over in America. I never had that fear when I was pulled up in Germany.

    Its more to do with how many guns we have and the rate of violent crime though.

23. Race, location, and age make all the difference. Some regions’ police brutality rates are twice as high as others; black Americans are twice as likely as white Americans to be subjected to it.

24. For myself, no. I am a middle aged white woman. Not normally seen as a threat. I realize I have privilege that many do not have.

    I am concerned about friends and the children of friends being a victim of police brutality through no fault of their own.

    I do not believe that they are all monsters. I do believe jobs that give you authority over people attract unsavory types that are able to get through the screening processes. I also believe that there is a blue code of silence that protects some officers who should be prosecuted

25. If they’re smart, they are.

26. It depends where you are, the police in my area are super chill and reasonable. I heard cops tends to be very aggressive in the bad parts of cities.

27. Yea kinda, I’m definitely worried for people who don’t come across as gay/non-threatening as me and are darker skinned than I am. A cop asked me if me and my friend were fags at one time then made us take off our shirts and get on the ground for smoking a joint in the park, which wasn’t a great experience. But I can only imagine like way worse happens.

    It’s scary when there’s no accountability for people who can harass or shoot you

28. I’m not. I’ve had bad interactions with the police and I’ve had really good ones. Like a cop showed me as a 16 year old how to change a tire a tire after dark when I had a flat. Then he called my parents later to make sure I made it home ok.

29. Personally, no, but I’m middle-class, live in a nice area and am generally perceived as white (even though I’m Latino) so I know the chances of anything happening to me are low. But I am well aware that there are a lot of people at much higher risk of it than me, and honestly, even one person being needlessly abused by any agent of the state is too many.

30. No. The vast majority are perfectly normal people. And in before “WhAt AbOuT mInOrItIeS?” I’m black. Yes I recognize there’s a lot of shit that needs to be cleaned up but doesn’t mean I’m paranoid about police interactions

31. I’m a middle class white woman and they’ve gotten more aggressive with me since I developed a disability that causes a tremor. So far I’ve only interacted with police on good days and going through license checks, so I wasn’t already in the wrong for some reason.

    I figure it’s 50/50 that things go badly if I ever interact with the police while I can’t speak clearly or I’m shaking or otherwise look more “suspicious”.

32. Most aren’t, no. And most will never experience police being assholes to them either.

    That being said, even though I’m not personally worried about it, I still think there’s a festering cop culture that’s toxic at best and downright fatally destructive at worst. And it’s become so politicized that saying “Hey, maybe not all cops are bastards but a whole bunch of them sure are, and this encourages other assholes to join and pushes out the good cops, creating a self perpetuating cycle”, you’ll get called a leftist libtard or some other unoriginal name.

    Long story short, the problem exists, but it’s rare enough that most people will never experience it and don’t have to fear it. The bigger problem is that it exists at all and there’s very little accountability for when it *does* happen.

33. Not particularly, but I’m an old white man with no record, not even a traffic citation. I understand that’s not the norm for some.

34. I’m not, but I understand many people are considered about it. I’m not a minority though, so wtf do I know?

35. Yes, a lot of us are.

36. Am I scared of it? I’m a 55 year old, white, upper middle class woman. No, I’m not scared of it for me.

    I am worried about many other groups of people who, for any variety of reasons, might find themselves on the wrong side of an interaction with an overreactive police officer.

    And I will give one example: many years ago my then-husband left the house after we’d had a fight (the fight that ultimately led to our divorce). He has always suffered from depression and anxiety and because of the things he said when he left (including throwing his phone at me and saying “I won’t be needing this”), I was terrified that he was going to kill himself. I called the police to see if maybe they could find him and bring him home. Or to the hospital.

    Do you know what they did? They asked me if he was violent, then the officer standing right in front of me said into his radio that he was “bipolar” and potentially violent. I never EVER said bipolar, I said “suffers from depression and might be suicidal. When I protested and tried to get him to rescind that he said if I didn’t calm down and stop “threatening him”, he would arrest me.

    Then I spent the next 12 hours terrified that he was going to get killed by the police because I had called for his own safety.

    And again, this is at my white, upper middle class neighborhood in the North Atlanta suburbs.

    So, no, I don’t fear for myself. I fear for other people.

37. Yes, police are the only humans I am legitimately scared of.

    If they want to ruin your day there is zero you can do to stop them.

38. Speaking personally as a white person, no. All my interactions with cops have been fairly normal encounters.

39. Depends on how you look.