STRUCTURES OF BRUTALITY - THE COUNTERMAP

Police equipment and policing tactics facilitates the use of force and the feeling of being above the law.
Not only this increases the amount of police brutality cases but also escalates the civilian's reaction.

THE DIRECTORY

THE STRUCTURES OF BRUTALITY 


The term “police brutality” is used to refer to various human rights violations by police. This might include beatings, racial abuse, unlawful killings, torture, or indiscriminate use of riot control agents/military at protests. We wanted to go in depth on that and did research.   

We explore the structures of police brutality in four chapters:  
 
The police - We take a look into what inspires police tactics and goals. Policing is actively empowered and legitimated by real people and institutions and implemented through real policies and practices, yet both the reasons behind policing methods as well as their attempts at fixing the issue of police brutality are seemingly magical. Broken windows theory – “the magic of policing rests in its ability to appear as the remedy to the very harm it maintains.”
 
The order - The blind pursue towards complete order without questioning the roots of the disorder. When cops persistently harass members of a local community for loitering, when they follow young Black people because they deem them suspicious, when they use maximum force to resolve routine matters.  As Rizvi Uzma mentions in Decolonization as Care, “It is not a new idea to acknowledge that our vectors of identity (race/class/ethnicity/gender/body, et cetera) inform how we experience and consider the world, but what is significant in intersectionality is that that place holding happens in different ways at different times and for different reasons”
 
The law enforcement – Policing is a set of practices empowered by the state to enforce law and maintain social control and cultural hegemony through the use of force. The tactics and equipment which police uses facilitate the use of force. We all agree with the image of a militarized cop. The media shows us how they are there to protect us. But if we find ourselves on the opposite side of the police force as an extension of the state power, and when all the cops look like soldiers – we look like the enemy.
  
The violence - The cases of violence are only the signal that reaches us. Whenever police force results in death we hear about it in the media. We question the event, we look for reasons, we question the mental health of police officers and the guidelines they should be following. However, when that force results in violence, these are not the acts of bad apples, cops taking matters into their own hands, or exceptional incidences of policing. This is what policing is. 
 





Methodology
We first started to investigate what police brutality is and what kind of examples there are. The type of data we were looking for was a combination of quantitative data and qualitative data. We used secondary data what was already collected by someone else in the past few years. We built our hot glue page by collecting relevant data and putting that on to the website.  

Quantitative & qualitative Method: 
With the quantitative method we mainly focused on collecting existing data. The source for the material is all found online and was originally produced by companies who did research to police brutality. The criteria we used for selecting the material was that it had to be fact based. Almost 80% of our hot glue page is fact based and 20% is experiences from people/victims. 
For the qualitative methods we looked at various existing data. The materials were found online and the ones we looked at are:  
• Interviews 
• Break downs of videos 
• Policies 
• Guidelines 
These materials were all added to the hot glue page and reflected on while creating the common narrative and counter narrative.  
Because of the broad research we did we went in depth after we created the counter narrative. We focused on the structures of police brutality and backed that up with evidence we found in our research. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Works Cited 
 
Periscopic, “U.S. Gun Deaths.” https://guns.periscopic.com/ , 2018. 
Forensic-Architecture, “Police brutality at the black lives matter protests.” https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/police-brutality-at-the-black-lives-matter-protests , 25.05.2020. 
Herzing Rachel, “THE MAGICAL LIFE OF BROKEN WINDOWS”, Rachel Herzing chapter from Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives, http://aworldwithoutpolice.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/jordan-t-camp-policing-the-planet-why-the-policing-crisis-led-to-black-lives-matter.pdf, Jordan T. Camp chapter 20 page 219. 
Wetendrof, Diane & Davis L Dottie, “The misuse of power.” http://www.abuseofpower.info/Article_MisusePower.html , 2006. 
Hajdenberg Jackie, “When officers are 'just following orders,’ remember where we've heard that before.” https://www.heyalma.com/when-officers-are-just-following-orders-remember-where-weve-heard-that-before/ , 18.06.2020 
Governtment of The Netherlands, “Police Powers.” https://www.government.nl/topics/police/police-powers , 2021