On Monday, October 26, a video surfaced on Twitter showing a white police officer in South Carolina grabbing and throwing a 16 year old sophomore girl to the ground before handcuffing and arresting her.  This video quickly went viral,  provoking widespread outrage. A few days later, it was announced that the officer had been fired, resulting in a variety of reactions from different parts of the world.

Unfortunately, this incident was part of a larger pattern of similar events. These occurrences have been an issue for years, and often appear to be based at least partially on racial discrimination (whether intentional or subconscious). To put it simply, we need to make sure this pattern of horrific events stops, and to do this, we need to continue taking the right steps to highlight and protest these events whenever they happen.

The simple truth is that incidents like these are not new; police officers have a long history of abusing their authority by treating African American adolescents and adults aggressively and with a disproportionate use of force.  Multiple notable beatings and unjust arrests or deaths involving African Americans have taken place in the last several years.

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The mistreatment and even death of African Americans in police custody or while being handled by police is becoming an all-too-common theme, as numerous videos and pictures have been surfacing on the internet in recent years — all relating to police officers who are abusing their authority.  Here are a few of the major notable events that have taken place in the last couple of years that exemplify this broader trend:

• Michael Brown was stopped by police in Ferguson, Missouri on August 9, 2014 and was eventually shot and killed by a white police officer. Many witnesses say he did not seem to present a threat to the officer, and he was also unarmed.  
• Eric Garner was put into a chokehold in New York for selling single cigarettes.  In a video posted online, you can hear Garner yelling “I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe!”.  Similarly, he was unarmed and posed no threat towards the police.  He died as a result of this altercation on July 17, 2014.
• John Crawford from Dayton, Ohio was shot and killed in a Walmart parking lot for holding a toy BB gun on August 5, 2014. In another case just like Crawford, Tamir Rice, 12, was shot and killed on November 22, 2014 after police mistook his toy gun for a real one.  In both these cases, the police officers were not charged.
  

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These occurrences are very similar to one another and represent a broader trend. In some cases, like that of Eric Garner and the South Carolina police officer, the incident was recorded and the video became viral on social media. In the other cases, social media had helped get their story and news across the internet.  All of these incidents have sadly involved African American citizens who were unarmed.   

These abuses of police authority have been occurring too much. We often claim that racism is no longer an issue in the United States, but when these tragic events continue to happen, it is showing that we should still be aware that racism could potentially be a cause.

Creative Commons photo source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/thomashawk/4777015150/