Policing in America2
Policing in America
Following the Guidelines of the American Psychological Association
Policing in America
A police officer who is truly good at his or her job has a commitment to the belief that they want to serve and want to protect the public good. As stated by Stoddard (1968) racial profiling is a condition that has been occurring for a long time. The difference is that the people who are racially profiled have changed throughout history. There was a time when Italian people who are recently immigrated to the United States during the turn of the 20th century were all considered to be mobsters and involved in illegal crime activity. There was a time when the Irish people who tended to immigrate to the United States prior to the Italian people were racially profiled by police as all violating the prohibition regulations that were in place as well as other illegal activity.
Stoddard (6) in his classic work regarding police misconduct states that police have been known to use excessive force when apprehending suspects for crime. Excessive force is basically defined as conduct that is used to apprehend a suspect that is conducted in an excessively violent way or that which may cause undue harm to the potential suspect. These actions by bad cops so-to-speak result in millions of dollars lost by the government due to legal repercussions (Peak, 2014).
For an officer to use deadly force, the officer must truly believe that their lives or the lives of anyone involved in the arrest are in danger to the point of death. In these circumstances, then deadly force can be used. In major cities such as New York, Florida, Texas, California and even Washington as a few examples, the level of crime is so high and the potential for a police officer’s life to be taken away by the targeted bullet of a suspect could, can and does lead to many circumstances of deadly force being used to take down a suspect.
The answers to these questions may lie firmly in what it takes to become a police officer and the motivations behind why a police officer is doing their job or doing their work. If a police officer is motivated by the top dollar salaries that they earn and they are doing the job solely to earn a paycheck every two weeks when they would rather be doing some other job that would even pay less if they could afford to do so – yes, without a doubt with this attitude just about anyone would shoot first and then ask the necessary questions later. If a police officer is motivated by protecting people, understands the foundations of the U.S. Constitution.
There also needs to be a proactive and constructive internal investigations unit that will properly police the police. If the police cannot police themselves, which has proven to be true time and time again, then it is imperative that high moral standing organizations are formed in order to police the police when there is police misconduct.
References
Peak, Ken. (2014). Policing in America: Challenges and Best Practices. New York: Pearson.
Stoddard, Ellwyn. (1968). “Informal Code of Police Deviancy: A Group Approach to Blue-Coat
Crime.” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology. New York: Taylor & Francis.