Racism in the Police Force?

Social Psychology

Discuss how social psychologists might view the conflict between police officers and video advocates.

What many (but certainly not all) social psychologists would feel and think is that police officers are being singled out when they happened to get caught on tape doing something they should not be and/or something that is illegal. They would probably feel that police officers are being treated unfairly in that only the bad events and illegal events are being focused on. At the same time, video advocates would potentially appear to have the intentions of only zeroing in on situations and events where the police officer is truly doing something bad and probably would not pay a second thought to when a police officer is actually doing a good thing.

In short, a social psychologist would probably center on the idea that police officers are in a very stressful job and the video advocates are going to pounce and focus on situations and events that bring to light the subjects of police brutality and mistreatment of people for reasons like race and so forth. The problem is that those negative events do happen and video advocates feels that it is their duty to focus on that but police officers would counter that police officers have a stressful job, they might act improperly at times but they usually do not and the video advocates are not focusing on the good things. A social psychologist would likely center on how often the bad events are really happening. However, this would be hard because there is not a civilian camera pointed at an officer in many to most situations that they engage in. Thus, measuring percentage and such would be hard to do accurately and neither side (pro-police and pro-video) would trust the results.

What factors account for the stand-off between the two groups?

As indicated by the above, the police are (usually) trying to do their job while the video advocates are looking for situations where police are acting improperly. When it comes to video snippets being taken out of context and the full context not being explained and fettered out before showing a video (not to mention the video itself being cut and spliced a certain way), there could be a manipulation of the truth either way. The Rodney King video, for example, was a clear-cut case of the police truly being out of their mind and acting illegally (ABC News, 2010). As such, it is no surprise that there were riots when the police were acquitted. However, most cases are not nearly that clear-cut. When it comes to white aggressors/pursuers and black victims, that can be a problem. To be sure, if there was video of the Trayvon/Zimmerman encounter or the Darren Evans/Michael Brown encounter, it would change the discussion…but some people (on both sides) would not flex in the slightest.

Discuss how video advocates might influence the public to adopt negative attitudes toward law enforcement and favorable views about video recording of police officers.

Simple…and as noted above…they're only going to disseminate and show the negative police events most to all of the time. That alone causes a negative perception to be fed and built. Further, the demand of video advocates to have body cameras on cops is going to end up affecting many non-cops in unforeseen ways that will NOT go against law enforcement…it will likely favor them (Williams, 2015).

Given several recent incidences in which Persons of Color have been shot or killed by officers from predominantly White police departments, how might social psychologists explain antagonistic views minorities and police officer groups hold about each other?