Attitudes Toward Law Enforcement

This book should be made a part of any college level library that features holdings in social sciences. . . . Americans View Crime and Justice presents a national public opinion survey and its results on the issues. These edited results of a survey conducted in 1995 examine such issues as gun control, capital punishment, and juvenile crime, offering public opinion along with the analyses of a panel of criminologists. --The Midwest Book Review Readable and carefully edited, Americans View Crime and Justice reports and analyzes results from the recent National Crime and Justice Survey (NCJS), the richest and most wide-ranging investigation of public opinion on crime and justice issues in more than a decade. Conducted in June 1995, the survey features responses from 1,000 adults in the United States on now-volatile issues such as fear of crime, gun control, capital punishment, juvenile crime, and additional related topics of national concern. A distinguished panel of criminologists analyzes the collected data in this volume to present a comprehensive report on the development and current status of public opinion on these timely issues. Divided into three sections—context and framework; findings; and opinion, policy, and science—this authoritative volume also analyzes the implications of the survey data. Providing interesting insights and timely quantification of Americans′ view of crime and justice, this volume offers a unique view of public opinion particularly important to the work of researchers, law enforcement personnel, policy makers, public officials, and students of criminology and criminal justice, law, and political science.

This book highlights the need for empirical research to explain why some officers commit unethical acts and what might prompt other officers to report such examples of misconduct. This text offers an explanation of theories behind officer misconduct coupled with practical advice for law enforcement officials regarding how to foster ethical behavior while discouraging misconduct.

Using survey data from two metropolitan police departments, the author examines attitudinal similarities and differences among officers. The findings indicate that the attitudinal homogeneity commonly associated with police culture is overstated; the findings indicate multiple attitudinal groups among officers. These differences are less attributable to the officers' background and more related to the shift and area in which they work. In addition, the patrol officers' direct supervisors (i.e., sergeants and lieutenants) attitudinally align with their subordinates.

Policing the Media is an investigation into one of the paradoxes of the mass-mediated age. Issues, events, and people that we "see" most on our television screens are often those that we understand the least. David Perlmutter examined this issue as it relates to one of the most frequently portrayed groups of people on television: police officers. Policing the Media is a report on the ethnography of a police department, derived from the author′s experience riding on patrol with officers and joining the department as a reserve policeman. Drawing upon interviews, personal observations, and the author′s black-and-white photographs of cops and the "clients," Perlmutter describes the lives and philosophies of street patrol officers. He finds that cops hold ambiguous attitudes toward their television comrades, for much of TV copland is fantastic and preposterous. Even those programs that boast gritty realism little resemble actual police work. Moreover, the officers perceive that the public′s attitudes toward law enforcement and crime are directly (and largely nefariously) influenced by mass media. This in turn, he suggests, influences the way that they themselves behave and "perform" on the street, and that unreal and surreal expectations of them are propagated by television cop shows. This cycle of perceptual influence may itself profoundly impact the contemporary criminal justice system, on the street, in the courts, and in the hearts and minds of ordinary people.

The now-famous videotape of the beating of Rodney King precipitated a national outcry against police violence. Skolnick and Fyfe, two of the nation's top experts on law enforcement, use the incident to introduce a revealing historical analysis of such violence and the extent of its survival in law enforcement today.

The purpose of this study is to determine community atitudes toward the police. Policemen are either ignorant of, or tend to misinterpret, public attitudes toward them as represented by various elements of the community, and police relations with certain segments of the community are a matter of the utmost social and political importance. Yet there has been little effort to collect attitude data from those people within the community who might be able to help in changing the relationship between the police and the community. In response to this the researcher determined a need for research into the attitudes of community leaders toward the police. On the basis of the analysis and findings for this research, it is concluded that: Attitudes of community leaders toward the police are affected by certain aspects of their personal and/or socio-economic status, and attitudes of community leaders toward the police are affect by their personal contacts with a policeman.