Sociological Perspective On Police Analysis

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The sociological perspective encourages us to explore societies’ problems from a non-biased perspective. When investigating controversial issues it is quintessential to keep one’s opinion out of the equation. As C. Wright Mills stated in his 1959 essay “The Promise”, “Problems and their solutions don’t just involve individuals; they also have a great deal to do with the social structures in our society” (Leon-Guerrero, 2015). Eliminating personal experiences and self-perception creates an even playing field to determine fact from fiction. Certain problems are considered significant while others are not because problems affecting the upper echelon or social elite are deemed notable in our society. When social problems do not effect the social elite then, social problems tend to written off and deemed insignificant. Many of times in the political realm, politicians are professed as the voice of "The People". "The People" are the majority, unspoken for in most instances, lower middle class down to the poverty stricken citizens that have limited input in social change and are those that are likely to be most affected with social issues. Throughout this last year there has been mass news and social media coverage involving police officer 's use of deadly force in the United …show more content…

Police in a sense have distributive power, with this authority comes accountability. As stated in Klinger’s “Into the Kill Zone” (2004), police make errors, they get scared, they suffer from post-traumatic stress after they shoot people and not all incidents involve death. Conversely, social media anti police brutality organizations have demonstrated the strain among all these different tiers when during a protest numerous black males wore t-shirts with the slogan, Don’t Shoot I’m really a Rich Old White