Discrimination of Officers
An officer rolls up in her patrol car and notices a man holding a gun walking into a gas station near by. She quickly calls for backup, gets out of the vehicle and walks towards the building with her gun in hand. In the car, she can faintly hear on the radio “Corbett, wait for backup.” She ignores it and slowly keeps walking.
“Corbett! Do you hear me? Corbett wait for backup!”
She kept walking towards the building. She stands by the door, back against the wall, gun facing downwards. Inside, Corbett can hear a man yelling “Open the register!” She peeks through the door and the sees the man aiming the firearm towards the woman behind the register. The woman has tears rolling down her face. Corbett rushes through the door swing doors and quickly finds cover, while yelling at the man to put the weapon down. In the back by the cooler, she sees a teenage girl pull out her phone and start recording.
“Sir! Put the
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Today most of the Police Force is viewed on what social media has to say because most people believe everything they see online. “Media accounts of police misconduct also influence perceptions of the police, but less so than personal interactions. Frequent exposure to media reports of police abuse or corruption is a strong predictor of perceptions of misconduct and supports the belief that it is common” (National Institute of Justice). People who believe everything that they see on social media or on the news is how they believe to see Police officers. Say that they saw a video on Facebook of an officer cuffing a black man and people yelling in the background “That’s racist!”, the viewers watching the video will think that the officer is only arresting the man because of his race and not think about why the man is actually being arrested. This quote shows that citizens may view their perception of police officers differently because of what they read on social
The New York Police Department has a mission to "preserve peace, reduce fear, maintain order," and protect its civilians in their communities (NYPD, 2016). On the contrary, civilians do not see the police officers as individuals who are there to protect them because they do not trust the police officers or the justice system. In the past few decades, police officers have not been held accountable for their actions in a few incidents where a few unarmed young black males were killed by the police. Communities responded to this issue with the Black Lives Matter movement with protests nationwide to show support for the unarmed young black men who were killed by police. In response to the aggressive policing, methods of using body cameras and detailed incident reporting ...
The negative views of everyday people often make work hard for officers, adding more stress to their careers. The general public regularly criticizes officers for using excessive force and brutality, especially when a police officer ends up killing a suspect or criminal. Oftentimes, especially when a white police officer shoots a citizen of a minority race, the general public is quick to find faults in the officer, blaming the officer for being racist. However, cold, hard statistics show that the majority of police officers are, in fact, white, and the neighborhoods in which these officers are placed in tend to be high-crime areas with many minority citizens living there (Miller “When Cops Kill”). In addition, people might say that a citizen who was shot was not armed; however, almost anything close to the shot individual could have been turned into a deadly weapon that he or she could have used to wound or kill the officer involved. Whenever officers are in this position, the natural reaction is to defend themselves. Everyday, police officers confront the most aggressive, immoral, and sick-minded individuals of society. Officers jeopardize their own lives every time they report for work. Officers witness things that no person should ever have to encounter. They see the most horrific and gruesome scenes that the general public turns away from and
Sergeant Walls placed himself behind the motel room as a precaution, while Shanks knocked on the door of room 114 with the other officers. Shanks noticed a woman looking through the blinds from inside the room and he asked if she would open the door and speak with them, she nodded and closed the blinds. For about two minutes, the officers heard things moving around inside...
In the Ferguson article (2015), there was an example given about an African American man claimed that he was standing outside of of Wal-Mart, an officer called him a “stupid motherf****r” and a “bastard.” According to the man, a lieutenant was on the scene and did nothing to reproach the officer, instead threatening to arrest the man (p. 80). This demonstrates that the police in Ferguson had no respect for the civilian and even though the lieutenant was present, they did nothing. The officer was not suspended nor held responsible for this incident. By failing to hold officers accountable, it sends a message that officers can behave as they like, “regardless of law or policy, and even if caught, that punishment will be light.” (Ferguson, 86). This message serves to excuse officer wrongdoing and heighten community distrust. This is also to say that police can possibly get away with murder because they are higher officials and work for the
Police shootings occur all over the world but are a huge problem within the United States. We continue to hear more and more about them. These shootings are making headlines. Front page news it seems almost weekly. All the shootings go one of two ways. Either a Police Officer has been shot or a Police Officer has shot a citizen, but either way the final result is death. Whether an Officer has been shot or an Officer has shot someone these cases seem to be related to one thing, fear. People in today’s society feel as though they can’t trust Police Officers as they are there to hurt and kill them. And Police Officers feel as though they are in danger of doing their everyday duties because people see them as the “bad guys” and want to hurt or kill them. Yes, police brutality and racism still exist, but not all cops are bad. Yes there are still bad citizens in this world that want to kill and harm others, but not all citizens are bad. People seem to react to these shootings by rioting quickly after a police officer has shot and killed someone without
Recent observations were made with African Americans and Hispanics implying they have little to no confidence in law enforcement (Wihbey). Individuals polled in this study believe law enforcement professionals will use unnecessary force against them (Wihbey). Minorities within the above mentioned communities exercise poor judgement by taking matters in their own hands instead of properly alerting law enforcement. “In a number of closely watched cases involving the deaths of young black men police have been acquitted, generating uproar and concerns about justice for all” (Wihbey). When individuals feel they are disenfranchised, their response to racial bias, racial profiling, and politics is impaired. Ultimately, racial bias has a major impact on police brutality against minorities because of the swayed results of how people view a specific
A police officer is a law enforcement official whose job is to protect and serve all people, not to ignore racial equality. Because the U.S consists of many different races and ethnic groups, the ongoing conflict between police officers and citizens of color is constantly rising. Although police officers today are no longer allowed to have racial bias, which can be described as, attitudes or stereotype used against individuals of color to define their actions and decisions, officers sometimes abuse their authority going around racial impact tools and policies. This results in citizens viewing it as discrimination and mass criminalization. By changing the way laws and regulations unfairly impact Black and Brown communities can improve the justice
All cases of police brutality and corruption are very hard to read. In one case after 2.5 million views the video had technical difficulties and the public thought that social media was covering up what some officers can really do. In one case a young woman recorded her boyfriend getting shot in front of their daughter, in the video: “he was shot while reaching for his identification. The video went viral on Facebook and other social media platforms. Although the graphic video disappeared briefly after 2.5 million views, supposedly due to a technical glitch, it reappeared after public outcry and accusations that Facebook had purposely removed evidence of police officers killing African Americans” (Social Media 2). The content on the video may be hard to watch for some people,
The Council of Canadian Academies (2014) found that “as the internet and digital technologies become more deeply enmeshed within the fabric of society, the relationship between the public and police becomes more complex, as is evidenced by a number of cases where incidents of crime or police actions have been captured by video or stills and widely disseminated through social media” (p. 31). They also recognized that social media platforms are also an effective way at bridging communication barriers with the public about current police actives (p. 79). Canadian police forces have picked up on using social media more than the United States, but officers are taught to recognize both the good and evil in using social media (Robertson, 2014, para. 7 & 14). 70% of Toronto police officers hired since 2006 already use social media for personal use, so training is minimal, making it a relatively easier way to strengthen the police officer relationship with the community (para. 21). Toronto already has many success stories of police officers using social media not only to build community relationships, but stop crime as well (para. 22). For example, Toronto Police Constable, Scott Mills, stopped a mass shooting, because a teacher he met alerted him of a Facebook friend who “said he had a gun to kill all the
Many people depend on the law enforcement to protect and that's exactly what they do, but when people hear how police are killing innocent and unarmed black people they think differently about police, especially the families of the man or women killed by officers. In the article ‘Minorities in the Suburbs Have the Least Trust in Local Police’ By Sarah Goodyear it states, “just 35 percent of urban minorities said the had “a lot” of confidence in the cops where they live… in U.S. cities -one out if four- said they had
Domestically, police officers are commonly recognizable as the most hated profession in America, though the statistics that prove their goodness are put aside in favor of hatred and ignorance. Fewer than 200 black Americans died at police officers’ hands in 2015, though 736 whites died, and 642 of those whites were unarmed while around half of the blacks had weapons. We are not discussing citizen-on-citizen violence though those statistics are monumental as well. Prison stats-by-race make up nearly the same proportions as the deaths: twice as many whites are incarcerated and killed annually than are blacks, but race-baiters like ‘reverend’ Al Sharpton and United States Attorney General Eric Holder preach hatred and fear. I mentioned before the “pattern wheel” of American social attitudes, and looking back, cops have not been the only victims of the United States media machine in
Media has played a huge part in outing the very real problem with law enforcement in America [Figure 1]. The government released the total number of people killed by police broken down by race. More whites were killed then blacks in total, but minorities only make up about 38% of the US population. When that same data was looked at in a per one million view, the findings were for every one million people blacks were more likely to be killed by law enforcement than any other race (Swaine et al.) [Figure 2]. There is definitely something wrong with the way law enforcement is policing in general and the justice system has taken notice. In the state of
The public trust and confidence in the police force ranks among the highest of the force goals. Social media, in turn, should not damage or harm the public trust and confidence if anything should improve it. A fair and balanced use of social media is important for the police. For instance “Missing White Girl Syndrome”—the disproportionate media coverage of these particular victims (Neely, Cheryl 2015a, 11) can start to chip away at the public trust. This is because what the police posts on social media as they won't be seen as unbiased if they only cherry pick which group their social media will cover. Additionally, it was found in a survey that before contact with police, the public generally has confidence and trust in the police yet post
When it comes to the public opinion of police officers, different ethnics groups have a different perspective on police. Being an African American, police are just people who abuse their authority and feel they are above the law. Most police officers do not have a citizen’s best interest and always play to be the victim. They lie on events that have
Social media gets out of hand and blames one police officer then blames the whole law enforcement for police corruption and racism. When a white man is shot and killed or convicted of a crime no one shouts and riots he is automatically a suspect but if a african american man is shot or killed the police officers are looked down and blamed for such a tragic event and should be fired from his job when he was doing his job. Police officer are highly trained and take their job professionally and seriously they are not there to be a best friend or a parent they are there to constrain a felony from breaking the law so he or she will not hurt themselves or hurt others from the community. Mostly society takes the role of the mass hysteria of the false judgement and pins the blame on the officer then figuring out the situation of the