Policymakers

Twenty years ago, the country saw images of police officers heroically running into buildings that would soon come crashing down.

But over the past few years, people have seen uglier images of police officers abusing their power.

The terrorist attacks of 9/11 changed policing in America, according to William Terrill, professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Arizona State University.

And now, he said, policing seems to be pivoting again.

The premature death of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer caught on video May 25 raises questions as to how a call to investigate a person suspected of forgery can end up in tragedy.

In the graphic footage recorded by a bystander, a handcuffed Floyd is on the ground, face-down, and struggles to breathe as one of three officers holding him down forces his knee on Floyd’s neck for several minutes while ignoring pleas from the 46-year-old man and onlookers to stop.

In the United States, managing the tensions between the privileged, politically dominant classes of society and its politically, socially and economically disadvantaged classes, to which communities of color have disproportionately belonged, has always been a central concern of police and the criminal justice system. Some U.S. police agencies were explicitly established in the Civil War era to help preserve slavery and white supremacy.

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