The film ‘Fruitvale Station’ talks about the tragic story of 22-year-old Oscar Grant, a black man living in Oakland, California. On January 1, 2009, he was brutally shot in the back by a Bay Area Rapid Transport (BART) police officer and pronounced dead the next day. The movie portrays the raw and intimate details of Oscar Grant’s life in the final day before his tragic death. It paints a vivid picture of his vulnerabilities, struggles, and humanity, allowing the audience to connect with him as a regular person. However, this deeply humanizing depiction starkly contrasts with the film’s devastating conclusion, where Grant’s life is senselessly cut short. This juxtaposition underscores a harsh reality: while the director portrays Grant as an ordinary man with hopes and flaws, his life ended because systemic racism often leads many white law enforcement officers to view Black individuals as second-class citizens. This paper aims to demonstrate that such incidents are not isolated or the result of a “bad apple” but rather represent the inherent racism and bias entrenched in the United States policing system, leading to practices such as custodial torture, excessive force and violence, increased surveillance of Black communities, and fatal encounters. I will also try to reflect on the movie and try to contextualise it with other occurrences while evaluating the issue of police accountability in the U.S.
Oscar grant and the reflection of systemic racism in policing in the US
Oscar Grant was returning home on the BART after celebrating New Year’s Eve with friends when he encountered a group of white men on the train. After the group initiated a fight, police were called to intervene. Despite the white men starting the altercation, the police immediately targeted Grant and his friends; a group of Black men, as the primary suspects, quickly detaining and cuffing them. In the ensuing confrontation, the officers, predominantly white, used racial slurs and escalated the situation unnecessarily, threatening the group with arrests. In the climactic scene, Grant was forced to lie face-down on the platform while officers restrained him, pressing on his head as he protested, “You’re on my head.” Despite his compliance and lack of resistance, the situation escalated further, more officers arrived, excessive force was applied, and eventually, Grant was shot in the back. He succumbed to his injuries the following day. Grant had not exhibited any aggression or posed a threat, yet the disproportionate police response culminated in a fatal use of force.
Grant’s death, as with many others, exposes a perpetual pattern of police brutality against Black individuals. A common thing one sees in most of cases is that these young Black men are unarmed, yet excessive force is used against them, resulting in their deaths over non-threatening incidents. Systemic racism within policing has produced an atmosphere where Black and other minority groups are at a much higher risk of having violent interactions with the police. Fruitvale Station serves as a lens through which we examine the everyday dangers Black Americans encounter in their interactions with police, often leading to tragic outcomes due to perceived threats based on racial biases rather than genuine assessments of guilt or threat.
II: Data revealed evidence of racial disparity in policing
Statistics continue to indicate that racial bias is a contributing factor in the differences that exist in interactions between the police and citizens. According to a report from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Black men are about 2.5 times more likely than white men to be killed by police over their lifetimes. Furthermore, the Washington Post’s Police Shootings Database indicates that Black Americans are killed at twice the rate of white Americans, despite making up only 13% of the U.S. population. This is a strong example of the implicit bias and systemic racism embedded in American policing. According to data from Mapping Police Violence, a nonprofit tracking police-related deaths, were 3 times as likely to be fatally shot by police officers as white individuals from 2013 to 2022. This pattern of violence has been persistent, irrespective of location, which suggests that the problem goes beyond the reach of individual local departments and points toward an overarching, systemic issue on a national scale. According to this data, there have been 170 days in 2024 itself where law enforcement officers have killed a Black person.
In the movie, we witness Grant’s financial struggles, which ultimately lead him to sell drugs as a last resort. Black individuals often face barriers to education, employment, and financial stability, which can push them toward illegal activities as a means of survival, furthering a cycle of oppression. One of the central points is that police aggression always results in community violence, but officials ignore this and instead criminalise entire populations rather than addressing the underlying socioeconomic issues. Legal scholar Alexandra Natapoff addresses this issue in her book, explaining how the routine practice of stopping, arresting, and charging people with low-level offenses frequently sets them on a more destructive path. “This is how most people encounter the criminal apparatus, and it’s the first step of mass incarceration, the initial net that sweeps people of colour disproportionately into the criminal system,” Natapoff states. She argues that this vast policing and prosecutorial network around minor infractions disproportionately exposes Black individuals to the criminal justice system. According to her, this pervasive focus on minor offenses is key to understanding the worst dysfunctions within the U.S. criminal justice system. According to the Pew Research Centre, Black individuals are 5 times more likely to be unfairly stopped by the Police than White individuals. In the film and in the case of Oscar, this bias is evident when the BART officers immediately targeted the group of Black individuals as their primary suspects, even though the altercation was initiated by a group of white men. This reflects a broader societal issue where Black individuals, even those who are unarmed, are consistently perceived as a ‘threat.’ In the minds of many white law enforcement officers, this perception becomes a misguided justification for the use of excessive force against them.
III: Calls for Justice, Protests and Accountability
The recent protests in the United States and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement did not emerge out of nowhere. They are deeply rooted in generations of systemic racism, biases, and injustices within the U.S. policing system. Incidents such as those of Rodney King, Amadou Diallo, Sean Bell, and Anthony Smith in the 1990s and early 2000s further demonstrate that, despite the abolition of slavery, prejudice and violence against minority individuals remain pervasive in American society. In the documentary 13th, the police system in America is revealed to have become even more militarized, with increased rates of incarceration and corporate businesses gaining money from mass imprisonment. This prison industrial complex for profit is a product of systemic policy, much of which was fueled by U.S. presidents who advocated aggressive law enforcement policies. For example, Nixon’s “law and order” and Reagan’s “war on drugs” disproportionately impacted Black communities, euphemistically reinforcing hyper-segregation and racial injustice. Narratives in media have perpetuated this issue, instilling White Americans with fear of crime supposedly committed by Blacks, who were frequently demonized as “super-predators,” as explained in the documentary. Meanwhile, these narratives made Black Americans afraid of being incarcerated and brutalized by police. This likewise reinforces negative stereotypes within policing systems that consequently treat Black people as criminal or dangerous.
At the end of Fruitvale Station, we learn that the officer who shot Oscar Grant was charged with murder but was ultimately convicted of involuntary manslaughter. He served only 11 months of a two-year sentence after claiming he had mistakenly fired his gun when intending to use his taser. Another interesting thing to note is how the film depicted the shooting scene; primarily focusing on the impact of it on Grant’s friends and family rather than what actions of the officers or their consequences later. This brings us to an important question: What happens to these law enforcement officers after such encounters? And are they actually held accountable for encounters such as these?
In the film, we see Officer Mehserle pinning Oscar Grant down while other police officers stood by, witnessing the incident unfold. It was clear that Grant was unarmed and lying on his stomach. However, during the trial, the witnessing officers falsely claimed that they saw Grant “attacking” Mehserle, a statement the court later deemed untrue. This scenario reflects a broader issue often discussed in class: the difficulty of holding police officers accountable due to the unwillingness of their colleagues to report misconduct. A strong sense of unity among officers often obstructs justice, making accountability elusive and evidence insufficient due to the other officers, most of the times, being the only witnesses. In Grant’s case, despite being convicted, Mehserle was only held liable for involuntary manslaughter rather than murder. Similarly, other cases demonstrate a troubling pattern of police officers escaping significant consequences. For instance, Sean Bell, a man shot just hours before his wedding in 2009, saw the officers involved acquitted due to “insufficient evidence“ that they had acted wilfully. In 2011, Anthony Lamar Smith was killed by Officer Jason Stockley, who shot him after a car chase. Although the incident was a clear case of cold-blooded murder, Stockley was not charged until five years later when a video surfaced of him threatening to kill Smith. Even then, Stockley was acquitted, claiming he acted in self-defence after seeing a gun. Another example is the 2015 case of Freddie Gray, where he was arrested on suspicion of carrying a switchblade and subjected to a standard police procedure called a “rough ride.” While being transported, an unexpected brake resulted in a severe spinal cord injury that killed Gray. In spite of mass protests calling for accountability, three officers were acquitted, while charges were ultimately dropped against the remaining three.
The phrase “Black Lives Matter” started picking up momentum in 2012 after the murder of Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old unarmed boy, who was shot by a neighbourhood watch volunteer in Florida. However, it was the brutal murder of George Floyd in 2020, when a police officer knelt on his neck for over nine minutes, that propelled this movement to an unprecedented global visibility. The phrase was amplified worldwide, with over 10 million hashtags used, sparking demonstrations across nations and drawing attention to the urgent need for systemic reform in the policing system. Despite this, studies have found out that police officers are rarely found accountable for the crimes they commit.
According to a report by NPR, many police officers accused of using excessive force were reviewed, but the majority were not in violation of any policies. In many cases, the criminal justice system declines to prosecute these officers, often allowing them to return to active duty rather than assigning them to desk jobs with limited public contact. Additionally, some police departments, in their desperation to recruit, overlook warning signs, such as an officer’s history of misconduct, and hire them despite a troubled past. The NPR report further revealed that authorities failed to charge officers in over 80 cases of killings involving unarmed Black people. Out of the 13 officers charged with murder, only two were convicted and of the seven officers charged with manslaughter, only two were found guilty. There is also a lack of accountability due to the legal standards set in the U.S, which allow police officers to use force even if there is a mere perception of threat. Hence, despite growing global awareness of police brutality in the U.S., police unions and prosecutorial reluctance continue to shield officers from accountability. While movements like Black Lives Matter have brought attention to these injustices, true accountability remains a distant goal, allowing the cycle of violence to persist.
IV: Conclusion
Fixing police accountability requires more than just policy changes; it demands a cultural shift within police departments, the courts, and the public. Without a culture of accountability, legal reforms alone will struggle to hold officers responsible. Public perception also plays a critical role. Increased scrutiny of police narratives, bolstered by video evidence like in George Floyd’s case, has sparked global protests and greater awareness. However, as seen in many other cases too, even compelling video evidence is not enough for a conviction.
Beyond accountability, systemic reforms such as sensitised police training, improved community relations, and reducing unnecessary confrontations can help prevent the need for force. If measures like these had been in place, it might have been possible that Oscar Grant’s life and many others might not have been tragically lost. Fruitvale Station underscores the urgent need for systemic change to address the root causes of police violence while also allowing us to understand why reform is necessary, not just by treating these incidents as mere, isolated cases, but by showing the raw, human side of lives lost due to this systemic oppression of Black people in the U.S. The film reminds us that Black individuals, like Oscar Grant, are first and foremost human beings with dreams, struggles, and families, emphasizing the importance of humanity and empathy in addressing systemic racism and bias in the U.S policing system.
Ananya Gupta is a fourth-year law student at Jindal Global Law School. Her academic interests lie at the intersection of social issues and the law, as well as the criminal justice system. She is particularly drawn to exploring how legal structures impact vulnerable communities. Ananya has worked on projects involving gender justice, and access to legal remedies, and is passionate about using the law as a tool for structural reform. Her writing often reflects a critical engagement with both the letter and spirit of the law, blending doctrinal analysis with a sensitivity to lived realities. Outside of academics, she actively contributes to student-led legal publications and enjoys engaging with contemporary legal debates through writing and discussion.
