Antibrutality campaigns

Most victims of police brutality, including not only African Americans but also whites and other ethnic groups, have come from the ranks of the poor and low-income working classes. They have consequently lacked significant political influence or the financial resources that are sometimes necessary to effectively publicize complaints of police brutality. Nevertheless, antibrutality campaigns have been mounted in nearly every major U.S. city with a sizable Black population. In sometimes large demonstrations, members of victimized communities have demanded, in addition to an end to police brutality and accountability for guilty officers, major reforms including the hiring of more African American police officers and the placement of more African American officers in supervisory positions, racially integrated patrols or Black-only patrols in African American neighbourhoods, civilian review boards, and federal investigation (e.g., by the Justice Department) of egregious cases of police brutality. Their tactics have included sit-ins, boycotts, picketing, and close monitoring of police activity, including (from the late 20th century) by means of videos taken with handheld cameras and mobile telephones.

In 2013 the acquittal of George Zimmerman, a neighbourhood watch volunteer in Sanford, Florida, on charges of second-degree murder and manslaughter in the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed African American teenager, led to the founding of a powerful social movement, Black Lives Matter. The movement subsequently played a prominent role in nationwide protests following extreme acts of police brutality against African Americans. In retaliatory attacks in 2016, five white members of the Dallas, Texas, police department and three police officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, were shot and killed.

Antibrutality campaigns tended to be led by activists at the grassroots level and by other members of the communities directly affected rather than by more-established civil rights organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the National Urban League, whose memberships were drawn primarily from the Black middle class. Indeed, Black middle-class support for antibrutality protests was often limited, largely because, like their white counterparts, middle-class Blacks generally favoured tough crime-fighting measures to protect themselves and their property from Black criminals. Because they were relatively inexperienced as leaders, however, antibrutality activists often used direct and confrontational methods, preferring street protests over negotiations. And because they generally lacked an institutional base and a clear strategy, they were often reactionary, acting in an ad hoc fashion and creating organizations and developing constituencies as the need arose. Despite such limitations, they were usually effective, because they articulated the anger of their constituencies, who were generally suspicious of electoral politics (“the system”) and who had no faith that Black politicians would adequately address their concerns.