Community Awareness: Police Brutality in the U.S.

Understanding police violence and brutality is essential knowledge for street medics. Street medics are often on the front lines providing first aid and care to victims of police violence. Street medics may also be directly targeted by police to prevent them from providing aid to others. 

This 17-hour course is an iteration of the "Police Brutality in America Teach-Out" (which originally ran  from July 1st-20th, 2020).

The original Teach-Out was developed by the University of Michigan Center for Academic Innovation (CAI) as a rapid-response educational experience to contextualize the surging activism against police brutality in response to the tragic deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and the thousands of Black Americans -known and unknown- that have been victims of the U.S. police system. The project was created through the collaboration of scholars, educators, designers, and community organizers from Michigan and across the nation led by the design of Ryan Henyard and the Teach-Out team at CAI.

This Community Awareness course makes those original resources available in a stable format supplemented with additional videos, readings, and resources to support the continued work on police brutality in the U.S. and globally. We encourage you to listen, reflect on, and share these materials with your communities. We have collected these resources to provide an overview of the complexities of police violence and the many issues that intersect with it. (https://www.coursera.org/learn/police-brutality-in-the-united-states)

America’s Widespread Police Brutality Problem Results In Tens Of Thousands Taken To Emergency Rooms (June 24, 2021)
(https://seattlemedium.com/americas-widespread-police-brutality-problem-results-in-tens-of-thousands-taken-to-emergency-rooms/)

A new investigation by the nonprofit The Marshall Project and data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reveal the depth of police brutality and unpunished violence that continues to rock the nation, particularly communities of color.

Since 2015, more than 400,000 people have been treated in emergency rooms because of a violent interaction with police or security guards, according to the report that The Marshall Project published in conjunction with NBC News. “But there’s almost no nationwide data on the nature or circumstances of their injuries,” the report’s authors wrote.

“Many of the country’s roughly 18,000 law enforcement agencies don’t tally or make public the number of people who need medical care after officers break their arms, bruise their faces, or shock them with Tasers.”