How the Police are Changing their Ways Through the Community
This paper overviews how policing in modern day America has changed and for why did it need to change. Various police departments across America have received plenty of scorn and hate in the media as of late, and this paper will introduce some of that criticism and why it is either deserved or not. Movements such as Black Lives Matter will be talked of as part of that criticism and why they are right or should be second-guessing. Police departments across America have a right to uphold the law and this paper mulls over which departments should or should not possess that right. Rightly this paper will focus on police effectiveness in dealing with high crime areas and relating to the movement “ Black Lives Matter”, reform in the police department and trust in the force, as well as new police tactics, specifically in community policing. Starting out this research project is much like any other typical paper I perform; I search for search terms through websites, typically consisting of Wikipedia. I perused through pages consisting of specific police tactics such as code phrases on their walkies, and black empowerment pages. I finally ended up taking the words “trust”, “police brutality”, and “developing tactics” in relation to the US police force to the library database to search for scholarly articles to back up this paper. The database did not prove useful in finding good reliable sources, it kept pointing towards editorials dating as far back as the 70s, so I then turned to Google scholar to find my sources through. It proved very useful as I found three good reliable sources that are presented in this paper on the first page on the first go at it. Some knowledge was not found present in this research process though, I did not find exactly which act of violence spurred the creation of the Black Lives Matter Movement. There are many different webpages existing on the internet that depicts different crimes relating to its origination, so I then in turn left that segment of information out. In conclusion the way that the police operate as well as the way they interact with their community has changed significantly in the past years. Trust is on the rise as a result of many polls to the American people, but hate still exists, and it will continue to exist so long as we possess free will, but the levels of intolerance can certainly be better and should improve. I feel that police officers all across the country and over the globe have the potential to live up to the awe and joy that I felt when I was in elementary school. In thanks to those improvements to community relations through actions like community policing, I feel that it can be accomplished.
Works Cited Goldsmith, Andrew. "Police Reform and the Problem of Trust." Theoretical Criminology 9.4 (2005): 1-28. Go0gle Scholar. Web. 15 Nov. 2016. Greene, Jack R. "Community Policing in America: Changing the Nature, Structure, and Function of the Police." polices, process, and decisions of the criminal justice system 3 (200): 1-72. Google Scholar. Web. 15 Nov. 2016. Haberman, Cory P., Elizabeth R. Groth, Jerry H. Ratcliffle, and Evan T. Sorg. "Satisfaction With Police in Violent Crime Hot Spots: Using Community Surveys as a Guide for Selecting Hot Spots Policing Tactics." Crime & Delinquency 525-557 62.4 (2016): 1-33. Google Scholar. Web. 15 Nov. 2016.