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from the Who-LiveStream's-the-Watchmen? dept.
The Root reports that “Almost half of Americans hate their police department:”
[DrugAbuse.com] examined over 766,000 tweets about sentiment toward law enforcement in each state. The state with the most positive perception of police was New Hampshire. The most negative: Arkansas. The city with the most positive perception of police was Columbus, Ohio, while the one with the most negative was, not surprisingly, Ferguson, Mo. Other “failing” city police departments included Los Angeles, Miami, Phoenix, New York and Denver. Baltimore, a city still reeling from recent unrest, received a D grade….
“If you talk to young people in Baltimore, I don’t think their feelings about police have changed at all in the last five to seven years,” says [Philip Leaf, a Johns Hopkins University professor]. “There has been a negative perception of police in many communities for a long time. There just haven’t been conversations with these young people or in the media about it until recently. There hasn’t been an upsurge of disconnect with the police. With cellphones, there has been documentation of things that people have been talking about for a long time. People haven’t been believed, and now it’s hard not to believe it, if you see it on TV.…”
“It’s not as if this stuff hasn’t been going on all along for decades, but now it’s being captured for the world to see, and the few bad apples being captured on camera are ruining the entire tree of law enforcement,” says Hassan Giordano, 39, and a candidate for Baltimore City Council. “However, those very same people who have a negative opinion of police will also be the same ones calling 911 when they find themselves in an unsafe situation. It’s a catch-22.”
It's important to note that on the graphs shown in the article, even an A grade represents negative sentiment.
More data and a description of the methodology are available at DrugAbuse.com, including graphs of tweet sentiment involving alcohol, drugs, and marijuana. DrugAbuse.com used the commercial IBM service AlchemyAPI to analyze the tweets.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday August 26 2015, @10:00PM
Of course the police are going to be hated when they allow their primary mission to be perverted into revenue generation. To add to the problem, many cities have stupidly accepted this idea that you don't want police officers to be too smart. Dim witted people tend to be more bigoted and more into power trips. It's hard enough to keep the tin horn dictator personality type out, and then officials make it even harder by following a policy of prejudice against intelligence. That's not the example to set if you don't want your police force to be prejudiced. Only makes matters worse when the cities tacitly egg their police on by turning a blind eye and deaf ear to reports of racism, sexism, or whatever other private agenda the officers want to pursue.
Whenever I'm driving and I see a police car, my instinctive response is one of anxiety. Is that cop going to pull me over for something? Am I about to be shaken down? Heightening the anxiety is seeing the cop point a radar gun at me. Doesn't matter that I've done nothing wrong, it's the whole oppressive approach. The radar gun is a quieter, softer, politer way of "papers please", but it's still "papers please". I've heard of cities having their police set up road blocks, stop all drivers to check their licenses and other requirements. Now that is "papers please", and it is actually illegal. Not too long ago, a suburb in the DFW area tried the road block stunt on Interstate 20. They worked it for about an hour before a knowledgeable citizen inquired about their authority to do it, and took video to send to the local media. Within 5 minutes, they told everyone still waiting to be checked to move along, shut down their road block, and cleared out. It shouldn't be that way. I should feel happy to see a police officer, knowing that the officer is there to protect me.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 26 2015, @10:36PM
I've been through a DUI checkpoint once and my passenger started recording the audio (we both knew it was illegal as we are both lawyers). The cop says, "Hello, can I have your license and registration please?" I replied, "Am I free to go or am I being detained?" He said, "No, you aren't being detained." So I just rolled up my windows and drove off. A car started to follow me, so my buddy and I drove over to city hall, while my passenger called the city attorney (who was a classmate, incidentally). We drove the 15 miles or so to city hall and stopped out front. The instant I put the car in park, the police officer got out and started to hassle us, the city attorney walks up to the car and asked him what was going on. The cop told him to mind his own business, so he asked for the badge number and walked back into city hall. A few minutes later another officer showed up, and while my friend and I were in cuffs and they were rifling (illegally mind you) through my car, there was a call that I'll never forget. After contacting him, they said "You better let that fish go. That public pretender knows the brass." He looks straight at us, goes "Uhhh" and just walks back to his car. The other officer who showed up is the one that let us go. My friend in the city attorney office later told me that they had a long conversation with the police department, as they had apparently told them repeatedly to not have checkpoints like that and the officers need to understand the difference between "detained" and "free to go".
Now given all of that, I think one can understand why most people have a negative view of the police. Imagine how differently that whole thing would have gone if I had as much power as they thought I did (which is the same as the average person and probably more than minorities), instead of knowing one of the few guys who can exercise some degree of control over his boss's boss's boss. True I may have created the problem by driving off, but in the same way the officers should know when they can and cannot stop people from leaving.
(Score: 5, Informative) by hemocyanin on Wednesday August 26 2015, @11:13PM
Sadly, the US Supreme Court disagrees with you. Ignorance of the law IS an excuse for cops to make a stop, and thus, it is the cops' interest to _avoid_ learning the law about when they can stop someone.: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/16/us/politics/justices-find-no-rights-violation-in-officers-misreading-of-law.html?_r=0 [nytimes.com]
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday August 27 2015, @12:08AM
Stuff like this makes my blood boil. People in government positions certainly do think citizens are serfs to be exploited and abused at will.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Anal Pumpernickel on Thursday August 27 2015, @02:48AM
True I may have created the problem by driving off
No. The cop created the problem by violating your liberties. Cowardly people who simply comply (and often criticize people who actually try to defend their rights) do us all a disservice and allow unjust and unconstitutional practices to continue for a longer period of time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 27 2015, @03:05AM
What I was trying to say is many people might defend the police by saying I was the proximate cause. Therefore I started that sentence with an agreeing tone, only to point out that the officer was not only a cause sine qua non, but more proximate than I. Perhaps I had my lawyer hat on too tight and got caught in my own cute sentence construction.
(Score: 2) by GungnirSniper on Saturday August 29 2015, @01:10AM
When your organization becomes so enthralled to metrics management, only that counts. So for police, how do you measure productivity? Arrests made? Fines generated? Reports filed? Good policing is like being a good SysAdmin, you shouldn't need them constantly.
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