How Does Media Affect Police Brutality?

Superior Essays
The perception created by the media after some sensational deaths, is that police use an unnecessary amount of force on civilians. However, most of the force used by police is legitimately needed. Police have little time to assess and react in very serious situations. The men and women who are police officers are well-trained professionals. All police officers, with some unfortunate exceptions, have procedural manuals that they strictly follow when using force on civilians. Most of the information put out by the media about the use of police force, is not correct. The media makes police look like they are the enemy. In reality the media is just sharing little fragments of a much bigger picture. Police used to be praised by the media but no …show more content…
They use anything from voice commands, tasers, to guns. When a person is not willing to listen to police commands the officer will usually move to the next step which is either physically making the suspect do what they are told or tasing them. When the suspect supposedly has a weapon and they won’t listen to the commands the police are asking them, things will get ugly. 274 people is the amount of people killed by police so far in 2016. The highest amount of these cases are found in California and only two of the thirty-nine California cases were black suspects. When you think of police brutality everyone always goes right to race. One out of ten people killed by police are black. The majority of the people killed by police are white males in their thirties and forties. 136 of the 274 people killed by police were white, 61 of them were black, 42 of them were hispanic, and the rest are people of other race. More than half of the people killed by police this year had a weapon. Why is it that the only cases we see on the media have to do with race, when in reality most of the cases are not racist at all. If you are committing a crime or causing a disturbance the police will show up, it is their job. It is their job to protect everyone and prevent crime from causing mayhem in the community. If you go online to the Washington Post you can find descriptions of police killing civilians. The …show more content…
My dad has been a police officer for over twenty-five years. He started out working in florida as a patrolman. When my dad moved to maine he started working for the Kittery Police Department, he was there for twenty-five years and held the position of lieutenant before transferring up north. Now my dad is the Chief of Police in Rangeley Maine. A lot of my dads friends are cops and I’ve never thought much of it. If you take time to get to know my dad, you would see that he is just a super funny and caring person. I have never had any encounters with any “bad cops” but i’m sure there are some out there. Every kind of job has some bad seeds, such as bad doctors or contractors. It happens not everyone is good but not everyone is bad. When you grow up around police officers you really get to see that they are only human. They are just regular people that have an extremely stressful yet rewarding job. Police are here to help and I know for a fact there are a lot of cops that will go way out of their way to help complete strangers. We should stop telling our children to not trust police officers because at the end of the day if there is an emergency people like my father will be the first ones on the scene and can provide the best

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