After living in Baltimore City for the majority of my life, I am sad to say that police brutality has become very familiar to me. I moved to California months before the beating and death of Freddie Gray, which happened just miles from my home. My city was deeply affected by the riots that followed the incident. This assignment sparked my interest to take on police brutality as my topic, as I would like to inform people of the severity of the issue.

In my infographic, I introduced the topic with 3 of the most important statistics my opinion. These included the cost of the damage law enforcement officers have done, which implies the affect it had on families and personal lives, the idea that majority of people are innocent in these stories, and the racial bias that comes along with police brutality. I chose to lay out a storyline of incidents that have occurred in the past 30 years because it is imperative for people to know this is not a recent problem, but it has been going on for many years. I gave a quick background on each scenario, but not without the important, gruesome details of the events at hand. For the next section, I led with the top 10 states with highest brutality ratesby coloring in states with the use of Adobe Photoshop. This gives the reader a visual of who is being affected most and where. I chose the color scheme red, white, and blue to signify law enforcement colors as well as red blood drops on the timeline to incorporate a sense of pathos to the reader. I did this to show that this is an extremely difficult topic that has much more meaning than a set of numbers.

Additional sources used:

http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2017/01/11/police-views-public-views/

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12111-013-9246-5