Police Community Relations Does it Really Exist?

The policing organizations throughout the United States have been the subject of vast amounts of negative publicity in recent years. Although these relationships have always perceived as tense, especially by minority groups, in recent years many instances of police brutality have been digitally recorded and shared throughout many forms of media, including social media. The advancement of technology has allowed for most people to be able to create their own videos on demand, typically with the use of smart phones, which has created a situation in which many questionable acts by police officers have been documented. Because of this relatively recent development, it is unclear if there is actually a rise in occurrences of issues such as police brutality, or if there are just more examples of such instances that are being documented and shared.

Recently, the U.S. Justice Department's Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) conducted a federal assessment of the St. Louis County Police Department prompted by the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson in August 2014 found that the department "lacks the training, leadership, and culture necessary to truly engender community policing and to build and sustain trusting relationships...

The events related to the killing of Michael Brown and many other minority members across the nation have illustrated the extent of the problems related to police departments' relationships with the communities they serve. For example, one issue that the DOJ identified in their analysis was that blacks are "significantly underrepresented" in the ranks of police officer and police sergeant and "moderately" underrepresented in the ranks of lieutenant and captain (Gest, 2015). As a result of the lack of diversity in the police force, racism is an issue in these relationships.
Race has been identified as an important aspect of police and community relations for many years. Minority racial and ethnic groups often view themselves as targets of abusive treatment at the hands of the police and although racial variation in public assessments of the police in the United States has been amply documented in past research, less research has explored the sources of these differences at the intersection of demographic, interactional, and ecological levels (Weitzer, Tuch, & Skogan, 2008). Furthermore, given the fact that these relationships are currently quickly becoming part of a national debate, there is an opportunity for sociology to better understand the current status…