https://www.brookings.edu/policy2020/votervital/how-can-we-enhance-police-accountability-in-the-united-states/

       Police brutality has been an issue for a very long time, especially towards African Americans. It is something that has been unfairly justified and pushed off by other law enforcement. The author, Rashawn Ray, of the article, “How can we Enhance Police Accountability in the United States,” helps point out the issues of police brutality and how to prevent it through rhetorical languages. Ray is a Senior Fellow at The Brookings Institution. He is also a Professor of Sociology and Executive Director of the Lab for Applied Social Science Research. Rashawn regularly testifies at the federal/states on racial equity, policing and criminal justice reform, health policy, wealth, and family policy. Based on these acquisitions, Ray is more than qualified to speak about the topic of Police brutality. 

      The author attempts to reach out to law enforcement, but he also tries to open up to America as a whole to help prevent police brutality from happening. He does this by breaking the article into different actions by telling his audience what is police brutality, its effects, past incidences, statistics, and ways to fix it. Ray knows that America isn’t fully on board with what he says but he tries to convince his audience to stand against police brutality for the sake of unity. He does this through the genre of statistics and facts. He presents statistics based on the number of times and how common police brutality actually is and how it affects African Americans. Ray shows a youtube video and tweets about how common police brutality occurs.

      It’s clear that Ray’s purpose of this article is to spread awareness about police brutality and ways to stop it from happening. Ray is trying to help stop police brutality from happening by proposing two different solutions. He explains that any officer that has been terminated due to police misconduct should not work in the law enforcement field again. This is to prevent mistakes from these officers from happening again since officers such as Derek Chauvin. Chauvin is known as the officer who brutally murdered Gorge Floyd, but people forget to recognize that he actually had 18 different misconducts before that. The other proposal he gave to stop police brutality was to restructure civilian payouts by moving them from taxpayer money to police department insurance policies. 

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