Who Is Karl Vicks What It's Like Being A Cop Now

Following events like Ferguson, America’s police force has received heavy criticism recently regarding police brutality. The public is questioning whether police are using their position of power to better society or to benefit their own agendas of racism. Karl Vick’s article, “What It’s Like Being a Cop Now,” fails in his usage of anecdotes and statistics to argue that the public is wrongly retaliating against police.

To begin, Karl Vicks makes use of many personal stories from police officers in his article. His goal is to make his audience sympathize with the obstacles the police face when dealing with the public. One of the obstacles is camera phones. Vicks writes, “[t]hey hold them out from their bodies, like shields, and up in the faces of officers, like taunts” (34). Although Vicks makes a valid point, the way people use their phones today can be very rude, but why would this action be threatening to a police officer? Someone who’s been through training, who supposedly has no intention of harm, should not be bothered by this. Vicks describes the police as “watchmen who are used to being watched” (34), yet the use of camera phones makes them uncomfortable. If they’re carrying out their duties like they should, then camera phones wouldn’t be

He states that confidence in police has decreased significantly since 1993, and with this statistic shared the audience is expected to feel sympathy (39). What Vicks fails to convey with this statistic is that the public’s confidence in police would increase if they made an effort to fix race relations between the police force and the public. Regarding the significantly low confidence in police in 1993, he even mentions in the article “[t]he atmosphere then was defined by the beating of Rodney King...” (34). The connection can be made that confidence in police is down because they’re using unnecessary overt force, but Vicks fails to argue against the