Public opinion of police Essay

Good morning (evening or afternoon) ladies and gentleman. I would like your attention because I have a subject to discuss. I want to talk about the public’s opinion towards police officers by different ethnic groups. There are many thoughts and public opinion on how the community feel towards the many police officers in this country. It is my personal opinion that people should not be hating on the police because they enforce the law, unless they have experienced some sort of police brutality and unprofessionalism. I will speak to you the various races ethnic backgrounds that have statistically shown me the truth behind why they dislike police officers. Amongst part of races that feel like that towards police officers they are Hispanics, African Americans and also other mixed races. Every Hispanic has their own reason to dislike the police officers in this country. For many it could be personal and for others it could be that they do not care and for some it could be that perhaps the immigration topic is what’s affecting their opinion about police officers. Anything a police officer does may not be liked by someone for whatever reason, so no matter what not every person will be pleased. Research and plenty of study have been done to find out the truth about why distrust is so high amongst the citizens and the police. They found that â€Å"police violence against Rodney King, Amadou Diallo, and the racist attitude of Mark Fuhrman led to a broad decline in public support for the police, violence against the police, and attenuated police careers. Negative attitudes also undercut crime control efforts by contributing to low levels of citizen assistance to police investigations. † (Liu & Crank, 2010). The other ethnic background that has problems trusting the police are African Americans. African Americans feel they have strong reason to have their own negative public opinion against police officers. Part of the fact is that since they commit plenty of crimes the African Americans get defensive when they are searched inappropriately without a valid reason and some of that public opinion has to do with the fact that they use to be treated unfairly because of the whole slavery issues decades ago. Just like Hispanics, young African American males are mostly stereotyped and are part of racial profiling but part of it is due to the fact that they commit many crimes. Other â€Å"typical bias-based policing tactics occur when officers refuse or ignore taking a report from a minority citizen but would have done so had the person been white. This was a common complaint we heard from the minorities we spoke with during the focus group meetings. † (Iomo, Becton, Meadows, Tears, & Charles, 2009). The distrust can occur from many reasons and this was just one of them. Many other ethnic backgrounds have the same issues as Hispanic and African American communities. This type of problem’s results are that: â€Å"Poor police-community relations adversely affect the ability of the police to prevent crime and apprehend criminals. People hostile to the police are not so likely to report violations of the law, even when they are the victims. They are even less likely to report suspicious persons or incidents, to testify as witnesses voluntarily, or to come forward and provide information †¦ Yet citizen assistance is crucial to law enforcement agencies if the police are to solve an appreciable portion of the crimes that are committed. † (Sullivan, Dunham, ; Alpert, 1987). Unfortunately this same problem still goes on today in many places around the United States including the world and wherever there are police officers present. The fact that some people cannot handle being police officers gives a black eye to police officers around the world when they do something that will taint that image. So you see why there are many public opinions towards police officers by different ethnic backgrounds. It all depends on what ethnicity they are from because that generates the distrust. In surveys Blacks and Hispanics usually always rate police officers as medium to low and Whites give higher ratings. There are many ethnicity’s that have a public distrust for the police, but when conducting such surveys or research the age of the person has to be considered as well as the previous experiences with any police officer or criminal justice professional. ?