Browsing by Subject "police brutality"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
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    The American Media’s Construction of “Participants” in Cases of Police Killings
    (Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, 2015-04-17) Johnson, Morgan Kristine
    With several highly publicized police killings in the latter half of 2014, the issue of police brutality has been reignited in the United States, as emotionally charged a topic as ever, dividing Americans politically and socially and racially. This pilot study analyzes how the American media’s language contributes to readers’/hearers’ perception of the identities and roles of those who are victim to and those who enact police brutality. Using a sample of twenty-eight reports of the cases of Eric Garner, John Crawford III, Michael Brown, Levar Jones, and Tamir Rice from the Associated Press, National Public Radio, and The Washington Post, I coded for patterns of race-related modifiers and of passivization. Based on the analysis of these articles, I suggest the implications of such use—how race-related descriptors can influence the perception of “participants’” (the involved police officers and the involved citizens) identity in relation to one another, in relation to the event, and in relation to outsiders and how passivization can influence the perception of participants’ roles, implicitly connoting importance, accountability, empowerment, and other such senses.
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    Visualizing structural competency: moving beyond cultural competence/ humility toward eliminating racism
    (Taylor & Francis, 2022) Kyere, Eric; Boddie, Stephanie; Lee, Jessica Euna; School of Social Work
    In this article, the authors argue that in the United States, structural racism set the stage that increased persons of color’s vulnerabilities and risks to COVID-19 compared to Whites, while simultaneously killing Blacks through racialized policing. They draw on structural violence as a theoretical framework to ground their argument and add to the discussion on the need for social work to explicitly build structural competency to effectively respond to structural racism. Most importantly, the authors contend that, structural racism entails a network of interdependent institutions and organizations that interact with individuals in a complex way to affect health and well-being. Therefore, eliminating racism needs to move beyond a single institution and organization to interdependent relationships among institutions and the mechanized paths through which their effects are translated at the community and individual levels. In this regard, instead of simplifying the complexities surrounding structural racism, we should embrace them and build knowledge system and tools that are complexity sensitive toward eliminating racism. The authors extend the emerging discussion on a renewed focus for structural competency in social work education and respond to the Grand Challenge to Eliminate Racism by presenting a “structuragram” as a heuristic to assess, analyze, and intervene at the structural level factors that influence the individual and community’s realities. We conclude with a case example and recommendations for structural competency-based practice.