Abstract
This study aimed to analyze the examination of the framing of unarmed black males and white police in news editorials about police beatings and/or shootings from 1991 to 2016. Using a content analysis allowed for the narrative in newspaper editorials to be coded by identifiable terms that measured themes based on the literature review and Critical Race Theory. For the sample, 165 newspaper editorials were collected from the ProQuest and NewsBank Sacramento State database for the following police brutality cases: Rodney King, Tyron Lewis, Oscar Grant, Michael Brown, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, and Alton Sterling. Despite the low percentage of findings that supported the literature, most editorials did display implicit biases associated with Critical Race Theory when narrating incidents of excessive use of force by white police against unarmed black males.