History of Police Use of Excessive Force Police misconduct is as old as policing in the United States itself. Beginning with the very first police departments in the 19th century, there were significant patterns of police misconduct, including: the use of excessive force, illegal detention and arrests, coercive tactics to gain confessions, illegal searches and seizures, race discrimination (with respect to both arrests and the use of force), and corruption (Civil Rights Law Journal, pg. 488; vol. 19:3). During April of (1861-1865) police violence expresses itself through lynching’s, beating, and forms of harassment during the Civil War. Police brutality by police began during strikes in the …show more content…
Reporting on Police Misconduct Introduced According to the Wickersham Commission on Law and Observance and Enforcement, in 1922, The Cleveland Survey of Criminal Justice published its survey, which served as the model for the Wickersham Commission and it was said to be very unique. There had been many investigations of criminal justice in the nineteenth and early twentieth century’s, but they had been essentially partisan efforts to expose existing problems and to identify the corrupt and evil persons who were responsible (Library of Congress Cataloging, …show more content…
Crime had begun to emerge as a national problem in the late 1920s, in part because of the problems associated with Prohibition Enforcement and the publicity surrounding gang wars in Chicago and other cities.
If we look back at high-profile cases such as the Rodney King beating in 1999, King was stopped by police during a routine traffic taking police on a high speed chase when a witness video recorded police beating him with a baton fracturing his bones and eye socket. The beating resulted in King ending up with broken bones, skull fractures, and permanent brain injuries. Several of the officers involved were charged for excessive force and spent time in jail. Following the incident, King sued the city of Los Angeles and was awarded $ 12 million dollars. The case led to five days of violence, resulting in fifty-four deaths, thousands of injuries, more than 7,000 arrests and $ 1Billion in property damage. In the wake of the Rodney King trial the Christopher Commission formed to create and conduct a full and fair examination of the structure and operation of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) informally the Commission ' formed under Bill Clinton 's Administration, while handling the investigations of citizen complaints. Findings per the Christopher Commission stated that many police officers ignored rules and regulations and management operations were failing (Department of Justice, 2014). Following the beating of