The War on Drugs (WoD has led to the disproportionate mass incarceration of Black and Latino individuals, although there has been a renewed effort among law enforcement to promote community-police partnerships. However, media, including social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook, has perpetuated a racial divide between minority residents and officers. A study was conducted on criminal justice students at a diverse community college on the East Coast. The results revealed that adults of color living in high-crime, low-income areas expressed interest in attending community policing programs hosted by law enforcement. Although the media often portrays police in a negative light, many young respondents said they had faith in and trust the police to be the ones to strike up these interactions. As a result of stereotypes about minority communities, many police personnel are reluctant to join community policing efforts.
The United States government has been waging a “War on Drugs” since 1971, with the intention of incarcerating drug dealers and addicts, particularly targeting Black and antiwar individuals. The infamous 1973 Rockefeller Law, adopted by multiple states across the country, resulted in lengthy sentences, often lasting from 15 years to life in federal prisons, for low-level offenses (Walker, 2022). Former President Reagan continued this policy with the Sentencing Reform Act in 1984, resulting in high incarceration rates for low-income American citizens, disrupted families, and new symbolism for Jim Crow (Walker, 2022). The article suggests that at its height in the 1980s, this policy ran counter to the principles of community policing, a dominant philosophy in the field of law enforcement.
The article begins by first presenting various thematic discussions in different literatures related to community policing. Community policing is defined as a type of law enforcement that allows local officers to create healthy relationships with citizens thus promoting problem-solving strategies. According to many criminal justice experts, the concept of community policing was first invested in the United States in the 1970s (Walker, 2022). They argue that the whites are more likely to support and implement local police departments as compared to other races. The Whites participate in community policing initiatives and citizens are more likely to support police presence in their locality either on cars or on foot patrols.
This article also underscores the fact that non-white people of many metropolitan communities in the United States consistently have less confidence and support for local police forces. Several studies have found that police departments around the United States pretend to practice community policing with locals, but in reality, many patrol officers are not interested in doing so and generally dislike the public (Walker, 2022). Hispanic immigrants and native-born citizens are all targets of the resentment felt by local law enforcement. While research is crucial to understanding the connections between socioeconomic class, race/ethnicity, and policing, it is as crucial to look at the influence of the media in forging relationships with citizens who are low-income (Walker, 2022). Certain media outlets, especially social media, have presented only one side of the story of police interactions with minority neighborhoods that are poor.
Reports in the media about the killing of unarmed Black individuals and the operation of deportation centers may have some impact on the development of law enforcement policies. The article discusses the negative portrayal of racial minorities, particularly Black and Hispanic people, in media and its impact on law enforcement culture (Walker, 2022). African-Americans have long been stereotyped as unintelligent, crude, and violent, while Latinos are generally represented as undocumented workers. This narrative has resulted in a sustained implicit bias against racial and ethnic minorities in law enforcement culture. Latinos have been the target of biased reporting, which has led to an increase in police harassment. In addition, hateful and racially charged language against minorities has made its way onto social media, leading some to label Black Lives Matter as a terrorist organization.
According to the study, one way to reduce police violence and harassment is to show more balanced depictions of people of color engaging constructively with law enforcement. However, even when Blacks and Hispanics complied with officers, police brutality and harassment continued. Racial minorities still welcome police presence in their neighborhoods, despite being targets of consistent micro-aggressions and outright hostility. The article also highlights the differential treatment of White offenders compared to their Black and Hispanic counterparts (Walker, 2022). The media’s timid responses to Ammon and Ryan Bundy’s militia’s seizure and occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon exemplify this differential treatment. To explore this idea further, the author examines student perceptions on community policing at Hudson County Community College, where the student population is mostly Hispanic/Latino.
The article describes a research study that investigated the relationship between various demographic factors and confidence in police, as well as citizen willingness to participate. The researcher used independent variables such as age, biological sex, race/ethnicity, and employment status to create a demographic model. Biological sex was coded as a dummy variable, with male being coded as 1 and female as 0 (Walker, 2022). Ordinal variables were used to code age and employment status. The study utilized a multiple linear regression test to explore the relationship between the independent variables and the dependent variable (Walker, 2022). Each predictor variable and the response variable were assumed to have a linear connection, there was no multi-collinearity, observations were independent, the model was homoscedastic, and residuals were normally distributed.
The article reports on a questionnaire administered to 184 criminal justice majors in the spring semester of 2017. 121 completed surveys were returned, but only 119 were used for analysis due to two students not answering all questions (Walker, 2022). As criminal justice departments tend to be male-dominated, it was unsurprising that 61.34% of the respondents were men, and 39.66% were women (Walker, 2022). The majority of respondents were within the 18-23-year-old age range, reflecting the age of the student population at HCCC.
The research examined the relationship between age and various attitudes towards law enforcement in urban areas among college students. The results showed that age had a significant impact on student confidence in reporting criminal activity to local officers, with an adjusted R-Squared score of 0.94 (94% variance) and a p-value of 0.00 (p<0.05) (Walker, 2022). Age was also found to be a strong predictor of student support for police efforts to improve law enforcement-community relations, with an adjusted R-Squared score of 0.98 (98% variance) and a p-value of 0.00 (p<0.05) (Walker, 2022). Furthermore, the study found that age was a potent factor in student willingness to participate in crime reduction rallies, with an adjusted R-Squared score of 0.84 (84% variance) and a p-value of 0.02 (p<0.05) (Walker, 2022). Age and desire to take part in neighborhood watch and community-police charity activities were strongly correlated, with an adjusted R-Square score of 0.94 (94% variance) and a p-value of 0.00 (p0.05) for this relationship (Walker, 2022). In addition, the study found that age strongly influenced student confidence in the efficacy of community policing through officer foot patrols and police-community partnerships, with adjusted R-Square scores of 0.97.
The author’s point of view is that community policing is an effective approach to reducing crime in high-crime, low-income neighborhoods. Notwithstanding previous racist media advertising that many racial minorities have of law enforcement, the author thinks that minorities of color are willing to help their local police and develop better relationships with them. The author suggests that police should consider the study’s findings when formulating future policy and that community-law enforcement partnerships can be fostered through activities such as police-citizen sporting events.
The article indicates that policing issues today include a lack of trust and cooperation between law enforcement and racial minority communities, especially those living in high-crime, low-income neighborhoods. This mistrust is compounded by historical racist media propaganda and the perception that law enforcement engages in harassment and physical violence towards innocent people of color. Furthermore, traditional policing methods, such as reactive, militaristic, and zero-tolerance approaches, are not effective in reducing crime in these areas. The article suggests that community policing, which involves collaboration between law enforcement and community members to identify and solve problems, is a more effective approach.
Several parts of the article stood out to me while summarizing the article. Firstly, the HCCC study, which showed that racial minorities are willing to support local police and work towards building healthier relationships with them, is significant. This finding challenges the notion that Blacks and Latinos living in low-income neighborhoods are unwilling to build healthier relationships with police, as claimed by some prior literature. Similarly, the article highlights the need for law enforcement executives and community members to engage in conversations to outline area-specific needs when seeking ways to build healthier communities.
References
Walker, R. (2022). Foot patrol, neighborhood watch & football: An analysis of college criminal justice student willingness, and confidence in law enforcement to engage in community policing. Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture, 22(1), 71-91. Web.