Law Enforcement Stereotypes

Why do Law Enforcement Officers Receive so Much Hate? In recent history, it has become significantly more obvious that law enforcement agencies and officers are targeted by a vast amount of the community and media. It seems that everywhere we look, there is a story brewing about police brutality or police inequality. Thanks to the available technology more and more people are pulling out their phones and filming law enforcement officers, on duty, losing their cool and attacking the accused individual during an arrest. Recently there has been a lot of controversial cases where people felt the police have been abusing their badge and their power. So the question at bay now is, why do police officers receive so much hate? Is it fair for the

At some point, cops were local heroes and real outstanding citizens in their communities. This lead me to question the sudden change in law enforcement stereotypes. The first thing I came across is that too many law enforcement officers have failed at maintaining a good public relation. What I mean by this is that, generally people want to feel comfortable speaking to police and trust isn’t given it is earned. When police officers fail to administer a friendship with their community, trust is never established. 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. With this being said, when an officer guns down an unarmed civilian, the media is all over that case. Very rarely does the officers point of view get to be included in the news cast and the main focus is always on the victim’s death. The issue with the media is often the news title. For example, “African American teen shot dead by police in Porterville”. The title of the news articles is usually misleading in order to interest the viewer into watching the news. This is especially true when the media feels it necessary to include the race of the victim into the title. This small town shooting of a criminal by law enforcement is now being shared all over the internet because the victim