Rethinking Police Reform in Liberia: With Focus on Police Brutality

From a qualitative approach coupled with firsthand experience view as a form of ethnographic research, this paper rethinks police reform in Liberia with a focus on police brutality. Empirically, it established the veracity of rising police brutality in Liberia. As its theoretical framework that explained the causes of police brutality, this article through assumption attributes the causes of police brutality in Liberia to the individual-level factors, organizational-level factors, and the public unawareness or lack of knowledge of the rules and procedures that guide police operations. Under the organizational-level factors, it assumes that the failure of the reform to have infused behavior health training and emotional intelligence into the Basic Recruit curricula and advanced in-service training module that would have helped tackle the individual-level factors and educate the public about rules and procedures that guide police operations give rise to police brutality in Liberia. It recommends an assessment survey that will inform the Liberia National Police decision to infuse BHT and EI in both BRT and advance in-service training at the Liberia National Police Training Academy and Training School.