Jiyoon Ahn Akachi Emighara 5 1 2019 Polarizing Perceptions in Policing a Split America My family lived in a quaint house in the middle of Fourth Ward Houston Although the area was rife with crime I had never really understood the danger of living in an impoverished neighborhood because my parents isolated us from the surrounding community However when I was 11 my mother and I came home on the ride back from school to a barren household Thieves had broken into our sacred space through my sister s window and stripped the house of everything TV s computers my piggybank everything we owned save the furniture was nowhere to be seen Our faces went pale but I still had an inkling of hope the robbers left the crowbar they had used for entry by the window sill Surely if we called the police everything would be alright Despite the police showing up at our front door about 30 minutes after we had called them my family felt relieved They would catch the bad guys and our belongings would be rightfully returned Little did I know the world did not work the way I envisioned Once they arrived at our door we explained the situation the best we could while masking the desperation in our voices The cops then explained to us that they came from Montrose an affluent neighborhood just 10 minutes from Fourth Ward They said that it was unfortunate that they could not help because they had more urgent matters to attend to Those words to our family felt like a beating after what we had been through The police left in a fraction of the time they took to arrive and did not even bother to survey the area for evidence we were left with the crowbar as a mere souvenir I felt empty and was seized with a bitterness towards law enforcement that has stayed with me ever since Although this might sound as a moment of terrible luck experiences with the police even worse than my own are regrettably all too common in America Law enforcement preserves the rich and white while the poor minorities are left to rot with the criminals This creates a split in perception between the two that are radically different Regardless of personal bias towards or against the cops one can clearly see that public opinion concerning the police is extremely divided and polarized towards two radically separate sides of the spectrum Through one lens the police are exalted as protectors of good but through the other lens police are abhorred as moral criminals who are protected by the law This dichotomy in public opinion is caused by the unequal policing of race and socioeconomic status and further influenced by popular media portrayal of both cops and criminals alike Jiyoon Ahn Akachi Emighara 5 1 2019 A creative depiction on how black children are received as a threat in America Foremost the divisiveness of public opinion regarding the police is a direct result of racially biased enforcement that can be traced back to the creation of the United States itself Much of the southern police departments actually began as slave patrols with the first being created in 1704 Kapeller 2016 Overtime the violence and unjustified hatred towards people of color had become more subtle slyly masking it s presence through carefully worded racist legislation that appealed to the morality of all Americans Today these racist policies can be clearly seen in the American war on drugs Although police racism has expanded to encompass most minorities it is still primarily a black problem Dr Hernandez stated in his lecture on crime and deviance that the war on drugs target minorities and disenfranchise the minority and specifically the black population The entrenchment of the racial caste system loss of education increased incarceration rates and destruction of families are all consequences resulting from this war that effect minority populations exponentially more than their white counterparts Hernandez 2019 Dr Hernandez words are rooted in hard evidence and not just mere opinion According to a study done by Figures et al drugs are used as an excuse to unlawfully stop and search black men and women far more often than white people It should be noted that in this study black men specifically are exposed to a police stop significantly higher than their female counterparts with the stop rate of black men being as high as 976 per 1 000 18 year old black men Figures Legewie 2019 These police stops frequently lead to incarceration which steals the time of black individuals time they could be spending on their career raising children or merely enjoying freedom that America has promised them Brittney Cooper expands on this notion in her speech The Racial Politics of Time She states that time is not only stolen from Jiyoon Ahn Akachi Emighara 5 1 2019 black people in America through law enforcement it is also rewritten By rewritten she explains that white people brush aside the severe problem of racism within law enforcement by exclaiming that America is Post racial Cooper believes that this compounds the negative impact of racially biased policing by robbing blacks of their ability to speak about the injustices that they suffer Cooper 2012 Just as any citizen is understandingly fearful of thieves the Black community especially black men fear police as robbers of their time This is further supported by a study on the perception of police done by a Pew Research Center and USA Today poll in an article published by Vox Journalism The survey conducted states shows that 62 of black people questioned have very little confidence that police officers in their community treat blacks and whites equally while 72 of white people have A fair amount or great deal of confidence Chang 2016 While race is an incredibly large contributor towards polarity of police perception socioeconomic class can also help explain this phenomenon Police perception also suffers a major discrepancy between contrasting socioeconomic statuses Poorer members of society reflect a worse opinion of cops in comparison to members of higher socioeconomic status because they are punished much harder through more incarceration and disproportional ticket court fees In fact rich people are often able to forego incarceration all together as long as they can pay for it In a BuzzFeedNews segment titled How Rich People Buy Their Way Out of Jail Sometimes rich people are able to receive disproportionate sentencing in their favor by accepting plea bargains and paying the victims of their crimes outside of court They are also able
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