Preventing Police Misconduct

preventing police misconduct

Preventing Police Misconduct

Daniel Turowski

American InterContinental University

Abstract

Police officers encounter many different things on a daily basis that can change their outlook on the world today. Many city and state governments have had to make budget cuts putting fewer officers on our streets today. Police misconduct can be attributed to being over worked, under payed, and peer pressure. Police officers should be required to undergo yearly evaluations to check state of mind and ability to continue job.

Preventing Police Misconduct

In today’s ever changing world, police misconduct still continues. The police department, media, and even civilians know that this is occurring, yet do nothing to prevent it. Police misconduct was up almost 25% from 2001-2007 as reported by USA Today in 2007. While everything is not always avoidable, procedures could and should be put into place to decrease the quantity of police misconduct occurrences. Why are we allowing this to happen? What can we do to possibly avoid blatant misconduct? Police officers should be required to undergo yearly evaluations to check state of mind and physical ability to help prevent misconduct.

Police misconduct comes in several forms. They are police brutality, false arrest, racial profiling, falsified evidence, and police corruption. It is hard to tell immediately if a new officer is going to be a risk to any of the above misconduct categories. While an officer is in the line of duty, his mental outlook can change based on things he has done and/or seen others do. Laurence Miller states that officers are subjected to deal with the most violent, impulsive, and predatory members in the world (Miller,L.1995). Police misconduct most often occurs because of stress and peer pressure. Over time the police officer will no longer be in the same physical shape or have the same mental outlook on the world as he did when he first entered the police...