Jeannine Bell is a police behavior and hate crimes expert and professor in the Maurer School of Law. She has written extensively on both policing and criminal justice issues., according to the University.
Just in the past month, four other black men have been killed by the police in the United States, according to the release.
“Although the circumstances of these tragic killings are all slightly different, they have one thing in common,” Bell said in the release. “These men were killed because the police saw them as dangerous suspects, even though emerging witness accounts suggest that several of the individuals killed did not pose a serious bodily threat to the officers who responded with deadly force.”
Bell said in the release that this shows the need for a systematic change in the police system, saying that the killing of unarmed black citizens will not be stopped until police culture changes.
“The best way to change the culture is get police officers to see blacks not just as suspects but also as crime victims,” Bell said in the release.
IU Media School professor Anthony Fargo offers insight on the detention of news media by the police, which also occurred in ?Ferguson.
Two reporters from national media publications have been detained by police in Ferguson for no public safety reason, Fargo, director for the Media School’s Center for International Media Law and Policy Studies, said in the release.
Coupled with other instances of police aggression toward journalists, the situation in Ferguson raises questions on police keeping their actions hidden from the public eye, he said in the release.
“The detentions in Ferguson are, unfortunately, part of a larger pattern that has emerged in recent years involving police overreacting, often illegally, to being photographed and recorded in public places by journalists and other citizens,” ?Fargo said.
Valerie Grim , chair of the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies, said in the release that while Michael Brown’s killing was tragic, it wasn’t necessarily surprising.
“Not only is racism individual and societal but institutional and structural,” she said in the release. “This is why a minority group, as in formerly apartheid South Africa, can rule and dominate a majority for decades.
In every situation where racial dominance exists, change has to happen not only in relation to positions of power, as in a minority becoming president of the United States; it has to be structural and spiritual.”
Kathrine Schulze
