Today our law enforcement is perceived as racists, pigs, and greedy. As a cop walking around trying to do your job to protect people, how would you react knowing this is what people who you protect think of you? Would it be difficult to do your job? There is over 1.1 million police officers who have sworn in, in 2008 according to www.bjs.gov. That means there are over 1.1 million of police officers in the United States who protect and serve us. In this paper you will learn how the public perception of police impacts the officers’ ability to do their job. Each day a police officer puts his life on the line to protect civilians. According to Jeffrey M. Jones from Gallup News Service, confidence in our police has declined since 1996,
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The media gets their information from eyewitness testimonies. However, eyewitness testimonies are not reliable or accurate. According to the innocentproject.org “ eyewitness misidentification is the greatest contributing factor to wrongful convictions, playing a role in about 75% of convictions overturned through DNA testing nationwide” so even with eyewitness testimonies 75% of them get overturned or proven wrong in court, according to the innocent project. In “Ferguson is the wrong tragedy” written by McWhorter, the author talked about the recent case in Ferguson Missouri and how poorly the media portrayed the tragedy. The media relied on witness testimonies from when the event happened. The main witness was Michael Browns’ friend, who is obviously going to take Browns’ side. “We are told that this tragic sequence of actions shows that America “devalues black bodies,” as a common phrasing has it. But I fear the facts on this specific incident are too knotted to coax a critical mass of America into seeing a civil rights icon in Brown and an institutionally racist devil in Wilson.” The tragedy that happened united people across the country on the belief that Officer Wilson was a racist or “Devil”. This impacted Wilson’s life greatly. He could no longer go out in public, lost his job, and his family was threatened numerous times. The media portrayed this event as an act of police brutality and racism. This tragic event caused not just Michael Browns’ life but it destroyed the lives of Darren Wilson and his
The media gets their information from eyewitness testimonies. However, eyewitness testimonies are not reliable or accurate. According to the innocentproject.org “ eyewitness misidentification is the greatest contributing factor to wrongful convictions, playing a role in about 75% of convictions overturned through DNA testing nationwide” so even with eyewitness testimonies 75% of them get overturned or proven wrong in court, according to the innocent project. In “Ferguson is the wrong tragedy” written by McWhorter, the author talked about the recent case in Ferguson Missouri and how poorly the media portrayed the tragedy. The media relied on witness testimonies from when the event happened. The main witness was Michael Browns’ friend, who is obviously going to take Browns’ side. “We are told that this tragic sequence of actions shows that America “devalues black bodies,” as a common phrasing has it. But I fear the facts on this specific incident are too knotted to coax a critical mass of America into seeing a civil rights icon in Brown and an institutionally racist devil in Wilson.” The tragedy that happened united people across the country on the belief that Officer Wilson was a racist or “Devil”. This impacted Wilson’s life greatly. He could no longer go out in public, lost his job, and his family was threatened numerous times. The media portrayed this event as an act of police brutality and racism. This tragic event caused not just Michael Browns’ life but it destroyed the lives of Darren Wilson and his