Police Stereotypes

The response of society is also linked to the response of the police. What they see as ‘report-worthy’, means the crimes recorded within the police statistics will reflect what the police deem as a criminal act. It can be established that due to the weighty mass of young juvenile crime being displayed in the mass media, is that the police are more likely to pick up on juvenile crime and act suspicious on it because high authorities and experts see it as a social problem, whilst creating moral panics and stereotypes. In the book ‘The Social Organization of Juvenile Justice’ by Aaron V. Cicourel (1968) he outlines that due to the lack of validity official statistics present, that they should be investigated rather than used for evidence. Cicourel puts forward the view that police officers have stereotypes in mind on what a typical deviant looks like which then leads them to specifically concentrate on certain groups, resulting in biased outcomes.

He highlights how justice is seen as negotiable; for example, using Pollak’s ‘chivalry thesis’ (1950) we can establish that the police act in a chivalrous way towards women arguably shown in a BBC article which explains how women make up 20.1% of offences in 2007-2008, compared to the remaining 79.9% committed by men (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7401826.stm). Arguably, this negotiability is also seen with regard to race. In an article released by BBC, the author explains how “Black people are three times more likely than white people to be involved in Taser incidents” where “4,582 out of 38,135 taser incidents involved a black person of African-Caribbean origin or of mixed white and African-Caribbean origin - representing 12.7%” (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-34511532). In addition, Piliavin and Briar (1964) found that the decisions made by the police to arrest youths were mainly based on