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In True Equity Means Everyone's Life Has Equal Value By Shani Bugg

1050 Words5 Pages

What are your opinions on the police? Did you grow up in a community where you were connected with the officers in your area and had events that brought the two together? Or did you grow up in an area where you were taught to fear the police at any given moment? Maybe it is a mix of the two, or maybe it fully depended on the color of your skin. Growing up in a modern society that is constantly plagued by news stories that revolve the police, it is no wonder that there are a multitude of opinions on whether or not policing is effective. As we continue to make a shift in our thinking, we have to take a close look and examine what we think the best approach is to creating an equal, equitable, safe, consistent, and constructive mix between the …show more content…

Buggs is a firm believer that the reason many communities that have low crime rates is due to the fact that the “homes are stable, the environment is healthy, there are opportunities for youth and for the families” (54). Holistically, this makes sense to me as well. When we think of areas that have a high police presence or a surplus of violent crimes, it is usually in neighborhoods that are lower income, high in drug scenarios, and low in family presence. I also agree that community policing and work is beneficial to creating a safe neighborhood. In her interview, Buggs cites, “we have to give equal voice and equal attention to the many different voices in our community and the values that they’re expressing… it takes time to engage communities in a meaningful way” (55). If we were to look at a community that focuses on foot-patrol, increased accountability, and personal bonds, there would be a higher sense of trust compared to a neighborhood that has a high car-patrol presence, corrupt systems, and officers who have no ties to the area they …show more content…

This expert believes there is bias in policing, and the allocation of funds should be shifted towards underlying trauma and guilt plaguing certain communities. Growing up in Brooklyn and being imprisoned himself, Peterson has a strong grasp on what he thinks is the best way to curb violence. In sum, he thinks that the uptick in shooting rates is due to the COVID pandemic, racial upheaval, less money in lower income areas, and the public outcry that has recently occurred due to police shootings. Personally, I somewhat agree with the position Peterson takes. I believe that the funding policing receives is incredibly high and would be better served if it went to resources such as mental health programs, teen incentive programs, and health outreach in general. As Peterson said, “It’s not so much that the police are bad. That’s a cliché. It’s more that the force they wield in our community doesn’t make me feel safe”

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Unfortunately that is today’s society and how it plays a role on people’s lives. Gray’s death exposed the long-simmering mistrust between the city’s cops and the African-American communities they’re sworn to protect. The resulting protests and the national attention they attracted laid bare the systemic inequalities between poor, majority-black neighborhoods like Sandown-Winchester, where Gray lived his entire brief life, and the city’s growing, majority-white neighborhoods surrounding the Inner Harbor. PD now partners with federal agencies to focus on hundreds of suspects it believes are responsible for most of the city’s crime. He’s increased arrests overall, which plummeted last summer as violence spiraled out of control.

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​The police force we all know has one main focus, to protect people and the property in which they stand. Patrolling the areas in which they are assigned to, they make sure civilians follow the law and they handle any breakage of the law as well. Our police force is supposed to make us feel safe wherever we are. They have undoubtedly done a great job in doing so. However, over the past couple of years, the police force has taken a toll for the worse.

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“...Much of the recent crime increase threatens the vitality of America’s cities–and thousands of lives–it is not, in itself, the greatest danger in today’s war on cops. The greatest danger lies, rather, in the delegitimation of law and order itself’ (Mac Donald). In the book “The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe,” published in the year of 2016, author Heather Mac Donald provides credible evidence to expand on her viewpoint of our country’s current criminal crisis. In addition to “The War on Cops, Mac Donald has written two other books. Her works “Are Cops Racist?”

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Furthermore, according to research conducted by the United States Department of Justice, communities with high levels of disorder possess a more negative outlook on the police (National Institute of Justice, 2003). With Flint being one of the more violent and dangerous towns in Michigan, this further decrease the trust in the police to act impartially and to protect them. This also reaffirms my changed perspective on the police in being appreciative for their incredible efforts and

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3). Time and time again, however, the introduction of community policing has only served to divert taxpayer money away from valuable institutions and toward police without changing the relationship between the police and the communities they infiltrate. By nature, adding police to a situation creates hostility — individuals in communities that have been fragmented by mass incarceration know far too well that so long as police officers are present, there is a chance they get shot or go to prison. Situations that would never have escalated in a typical situation often result in arrests and violence. As a man in Prison by Any Other Name recounts, community policing gives officers opportunities to harass people for as little as “tossing a paper plate on the floor.”

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He proclaimed, “While no one believes the police are perfect, on the whole they tend to use force appropriately to protect their own lives and the lives of others. Moreover, racial disparities in the use of force are largely explained by racial disparities in criminality. Different American demographics commit crimes at different rates, so it stands to reason that those who commit more crimes will confront the police more often. Yes, there are rogue officers — and those rogue officers should be prosecuted — but the police are still a force for good in our society”(n.pag). In this excerpt from the article, I stand with his response to this political matter.

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Plain and simply put, if the community can’t trust law enforcement, then when law enforcement does something that looks even remotely out of line, the community’s perspective of them will get worse. Another thing I learned, was that many people hate all law enforcement because they had one bad encounter with an officer. From an educated perspective it seems unfair and even laughable that this would be the case, but the proof was real. One bad encounter with law enforcement and that person can correlate it to every law enforcement officer they ever encounter again. The strongest answer I found to the negative association with police officers was media manipulation for ratings.

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There are good police officers who still believe in what is right. But the ones who do take the lives of innocent victims and disobey their code of conduct makes other police officers who do, do their job look bad. Those police officers who goes against their conduct make other police officers look bad especially white officers who have no intention of killing someone over that person's race. Many people use to look up to the police and view them as perfect role models who follows the law and always do the right thing but now many of those who use to look up to officers now fear them and take caution with every move they make because they fear for their lives. And that problem is not okay because citizens should not fear law enforcement because their race is not white.

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The police have always been people you can call when in an emergency. They have always been seen as the good guys who are there to ensure your safety, which is why it is very important to trust police men as well as firefighters because if you don’t it may be hard to follow their instructions when in a dangerous situation. They are the few brave citizens who risk their lives on a daily basis to ensure their communities safety, so why do people have such a hard time trusting them? Perhaps it may be because of the recent police brutality assaults, which have become more and more recent, for example; the very popular and over publicized Eric Garner and Michael Brown brutality cases, which have become a major topic of controversy. Some other major police brutality cases are; the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, which ignited many protests within the community, as there had

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As suggested by some experts, the most feasible solution to reduce crime and at the same time create a better police-community relationship is community policing. First of all, in order to understand more about community policing, one must recognize the true definition of such law enforcement strategy. Community policing is considered an organizational strategy in which the community and law enforcement are expected to work closely together in order to solve problems that affect everyone equally; such problems are fear of crime, physical and social disorder, and neighborhood decay. The main idea of community policing is that those people considered to be law abiding citizens should be allowed to have some kind of input in what involves the police work, in exchange for their participation and support (Jenkins, 1995). This type of interaction is encouraged by the idea that police alone cannot solve all the crimes that affect our communities.

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Which influence officer behaviors to make peace with citizens. The advantages for community policing is that both the officer and citizens get to come in accordance with reducing crime and increase the security in the community and neighborhoods. This era gave citizen a voice. To help assist and work with officers as community watch to reduce crime. Unlike the reform era, who attempted to be

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1592 Words | 7 Pages

Police killed over 1,000 people in 2015, 203 of whom were unarmed (Swaine). Police, in theory, were created to protect our people, but they have been systematically oppressing, killing, and committing acts of violence without being held accountable. Many claim that police are acting out of self-defense, however in 2015 only 34 police were fatally shot, four of whom died by accidental discharge of their own firearms. This number is down from 2014, when 47 US police were fatally shot (MintPress News). The media makes being a police officer seem far more dangerous than it actually is.

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For people who live in the slums of the country, the law enforcement become a little “lazy” with their sworn duties and let the gangs and criminals run loose. Many police officers will be bought off to ignore the crimes that go on right in front of their eyes, including robberies, homicides, trafficking and money laundering. In cities like New Orleans, Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Las Vegas, whether it be gangs or the mob, the innocent inhabitants of these areas are at high risk of danger. Researchers from Bowling Green State University conducted a study about the number of police officer arrests. People would be shocked from the results.

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Several events in recent history have cast the issue of police actions and the relationship between police and the citizens they serve into the fore front of a heated debate. The trust between officers and the U.S. public would appear to be unsustainably low. Yet a historical look reveals that the conversation is not new, rather the result of an up and down relationship that has existed since colonial watchmen first walked the darkened streets of the thirteen colonies. The low points in the police-community relationship are often marked with strong calls for reform. Those calls for reform have become synonymous with the ideas behind community policing initiatives being ingrained and experimented with around the country.

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It also provides an example of how attitudes towards community policing in these types of areas differs from disadvantaged social and economic areas, which may assist in understanding how to bridge the gap in community policing as a whole. McNeeley, S., & Grothoff, G. (2016). A multilevel examination of the relationship between racial tension and attitudes toward the police. American Journal of Criminal Justice, 41(3), 383-401. doi:10.1007/s12103-015-9318-2

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