The Law Enforcement Officer Thread

There's a really obvious example of media promoting violence - Birth of a Nation, which single-handedly resurrected the Ku Klux Klan. If you count animal cruelty, there's also what Jaws did to the great white shark population. And, well, there's the entire genre of political propaganda, particularly when it's time to whip up a war. Your You Tube pundit is incorrect on no academic studies finding any evidence of media promoting or inuring us to violence, too - the American Psychological Association lists multiple examples on its site..

It doesn't have to be that extreme, though - in this case, all Hardline has to do is make people more understanding of and accommodating towards the militarisation of the police, and colour their reaction to the steady litany of shootings and brutality incidents going through the news. And media can absolutely do something like that - see The CSI Effect for another way media has shaped our reaction to law enforcement.

What's precedent ever done for us?

The CSI effect is also not all encompassing or true across all of society and it is limited. It also has generated positive effects.

You also need to re-read your link Just like the youtube video it says aggression not violence and yes there is quite a bit of difference. The statement is still factually accurate. It even points out there is no link between violence and violent media on the page. Did you not actually read all of it?

No it didn't singlehandedly resurrect the KKK that is grossly inaccurate by leaps and bounds. The KKK used extensive promotions, stumping at all levels of society from personal to government, use of aggressive recruiting drives, promotions, and advertising to attract people to them, and other techniques alongside it to take advantage of already existing attitudes in certain regions. It didn't create the attitude, thoughts, or beliefs they were already there to begin with.

Those thoughts and beliefs have a strong regional history older then the KKK to begin with that never fully died out. All they did was take advantage of what already existed.

edited 13th Mar '15 9:58:04 PM by TuefelHundenIV

Who watches the watchmen?

Speaking of portrayal of cops in media, after watching two seasons of The Wire, I concluded that this whole "cowboy cop" cliche is not only overdonex it's actually harmful to society.

You gotta need your evidences and you gotta need them acquired in a legal way. This should NOT be questioned, in my opinion.

I'm a (socialist) professional writer serializing a WWII alternate history webnovel.

I doubt many in society never mind cops themselves believe the cowboy cop portrayal.

Who watches the watchmen?

Cultivation theory and the third person effect are important psychological phenomena to take into consideration when having any argument like this. As it's been stated numerous times before, media consumption and replication of perceived behaviors are not a precise monkey-see-monkey-do correlation.

To paraphrase a collective of experts on the subject, media is not very effective at replicating perceived actions and ideas, but it is very good at causing endorsement and acceptance of behaviors and ideas. Playing a violent video game will not axiomatically make you go out and shoot people, but it can cause you to nod in agreement and approval when you watch the news and hear about an unarmed minority getting shot to death by a police officer. Watching a misogynistic horror movie will not make you a serial rapist, but it can likely encourage things like rape culture, namely the feeling that a person who was sexually assaulted or murdered shouldn't have been wearing such revealing clothing. I can go on and on with this, but hopefully you get the idea.

The point laculus is making is quite valid and heavily supported by social psychology. Particularly with cultivation theory and the third person effect, it's very much possible and indeed common for people to mold an ideology around events and behaviors of which they've had little direct exposure, hence people in landlocked bodies of land developing a fear of sharks because of a viewing of Jaws or people endorsing the KKK despite the organization, at the time, being on the brink of obscurity. And not surprisingly, many of our views on law enforcement are based on the type of media we consume rather than direct experiences with cops. Many TV shows such as Cops and CSI have justifiably received criticism for encouraging the kind of behaviors that lead to a mishandling of the justice system.

It's a pretty easily measurable and observable trend, and there's not much in the way of refutation unless we're arguing about a strict consumer-mimicry scenario, which no one here seems to be arguing.

edited 13th Mar '15 10:35:39 PM by Aprilla

It is also equally erroneous to say the media has such vast sweeping effect when we have evidence regularly and consistently believe and act against the depictions. People being afraid of sharks has deeper roots then just the movie to begin with same for pretty much everything to do with the KKK. There are almost always numerous other factors that play far greater roles in any of those situations and it is frankly wrong minded to continue to point to media as the cause.

Who watches the watchmen?

No one is suggesting that we all just woke up one morning and decided to put on Klan outfits and wipe out sharks because of some movies. Of course these ideas existed prior to the distribution of those movies, but it's undeniable that media consumption amplifies and proliferates ideology. The extent to which is variable and contingent upon a variety of factors that you've already mentioned, but the volume of media we consume and the extent to which we consume it precludes any tabula rasa notions about what forms ideology.

"Media" as a term is also quite broad, encompassing every narrative you are exposed to from the police toys you played with as a child to the stories your dad told his friends about being on duty while you happened to be within earshot. It's not a simple matter of having an extreme and highly concentrated exposure like strapping yourself to a chair with your eyes peeled open Clockwork Orange style and being bombarded with episodes of Law of Order for a straight week.

If anything, the extent to which (and what types) of media influence encouragement or rejection of law enforcement agencies is difficult to precisely identify because our perception of law enforcement comes from so many sources such as oratory, print and electronic. These themes are conveyed with such subtlety that the people producing the media often aren't even aware of what ideological premises they're infusing into their work.

I feel like this argument is really just four different people (you, laculus, the Healthcare Triage guy and me) just addressing different components of the same psychological issue, so I really don't think there's much to disagree on if we're viewing this from a holistic, collective standpoint.

edited 13th Mar '15 11:20:50 PM by Aprilla

Yeah I think when you include games alongside all other cultural influences as something that reinforces particular ideas you're on the right track.

The problem is gamers have a bit of a fearful reaction to anyone linking games to violence since most miss out the bit about "the stories your dad told his friends about being on duty while you happened to be within earshot" having the same effect and instead going full "GAMES MAKE MURDERERS! BAN THEM ALL!" mode. Something a lot of people who play games are kinda sick of at this point.

“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran

Aprilla: Maybe you are right more or less.

Ug Clock Work Orange eyes so creepy, so horrid.

Who watches the watchmen?

Availability bias plays into this dynamic as well. You could be forgiven for thinking that the world is going to come to an end if you watched the news all day, and both news outlets and TV shows are really bad (sometimes intentional, sometimes not) about exaggerating the prevalence of criminal activity.

As the saying goes, you can bet that between an event being a epidemic and an event simply being noticed more often, it's probably the latter. It wasn't until the last few decades that electronic mass information transference became commonplace, so psychologists and media analysts are having to play catch-up and figure out how the brain is affected by all of this data getting thrown at us.

If you don't believe me, look up data on the number of incarcerations based on race and economic standing and look up financial hardship, suicide rates and PTSD among cops. Then compare that to coverage of ISIS, Ebola and razor blades in Halloween candy. We have a problem with accentuating extraordinary events and downplaying mundane ones, and as Handle seems to have caught, The Wire does a great job of showing how much of a problem this can be when trying to tackle crime.

Accentuate the negative is definitely a problem. I haven't heard about razor blades in candy for a long time.

Ok this is getting a bit nuts. I keep getting redirects from the post button for study guide programs for local LEO testing.

Who watches the watchmen?

You know, I really wonder if Birth of a Nation was responsible for the rebirth of the KKK or if it simply energized a popular resentment that was already there. Griffith chose to present Reconstruction the way he did because that's what his parents and elders in white Southern society, who had lived through it, told him it was like. He didn't create his mythos out of nothing, he depicted the white Southern orthodoxy of Reconstruction. White Americans weren't driven to hate black people by Birth of a Nation, they already did.

Something else I wonder is if the KKK serve quite a useful purpose as a standard by which people can favourably compare themselves to deflect criticism. I suspect if one crunched the numbers, African-Americans were considerably more likely to be killed by their white neighbors in open lynchings than by the Klan.

edited 14th Mar '15 4:26:38 AM by Achaemenid

Schild und Schwert der Partei

Achae: I think you may be pretty much on target. Klan 1.0 was poorly organized and riding the waves of bad feelings of the civil war, reconstruction, and the upsetting of the status quo. They wound up collapsing from a combination of public back lash, government led legal action against the Klan, and the end of reconstruction. The legal action and end of reconstruction took a lot of the wind out of the Klan's sails.

The legal action was pretty important as it got the Klan's attention very quickly when it happened. The hood was thrown down pretty quick once the powers that be actually decided to do something. Forrest himself effectively disbanded the clan as an organization from mounting pressure against them and a real threat of official legal action against them.

However a lot of these folks didn't flee to the territories they stuck around and raised their own children and influenced their grand children. The ideas and sentiment certainly didn't die out and the Klansmen were far from the only purveyors of those ugly views.

Klan 2.0 was not only better organized but had distinct structure to it which included organized recruitment. I have seen folks make pretty good claims the revived Klan made good use of a combination of both business and military recruiting models and organization. They rode the new waves of social issues and unrest like the growing Prohibition/Temperance movement, a pre-existing but growing anti-immigrant sentiment, and a growing anti-Catholic/anti-Jewish sentiment. Those factors were not necessarily completely separate or completely inclusive.

Klan 2.0 was undone by a notably more extensive public back lash and again meaningful government action against them. The public counter move against the Klan is a lot more interesting in 2nd Klan then the first. The fact the leadership was undone by legal means did a huge number on the Klan as well and pretty much gutted them as an organization.

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Speaking of history including law have we ever actually discussed historical law enforcement in the thread? I can only recall discussing mostly modern Law Enforcement and policing.

edited 14th Mar '15 9:24:23 AM by TuefelHundenIV

Who watches the watchmen?

I know no one here has said this, but one of the greatest misconceptions about racism around and within the criminal justice system is the notion that bigotry is a distant attitude that can only be retained by a special type of person with inhumanly low moral standards.

I remember my grandmother and a retired black police officer having that discussion at a family gathering a few years back, and it reminded me of this discussion and the issue with Birth of a Nation, Cops and the new Battlefield game. One of the most terrifying things some of my older family members can recall is not that the Klan exists, but that they hold respectable positions including that of law enforcement.

That this was the norm not too distantly in the past (that I can still find several people both outside and inside the LEO community who can directly recall this) is lost on many Americans who insist that it's all in the past.

edited 15th Mar '15 1:53:28 AM by Aprilla

The 2nd wave of the clan was mostly middle class Americans of every spectrum but there is something insidious to find them in so many places of power.

Who watches the watchmen?

What do people think of the concept of Police strikes? Should Police be allowed to go on strike? And what happened in previous cases where this occurred?

Keep Rolling On

I can concur with the. The Klan as it is now is pretty much dying it seems (though their ideals and silent supporters are alive and well). When my grandmother lived in Atlanta as a child her family was ostracized by the neighborhood for not being members; at the time it was treated like some sort of community club for the wealthy socialites of the city, and not being part of it invited an "us vs them" kind of attitude in regards to whites who refused to join it. They were something of a far cry from the current stereotype of toothless hillbilly drunkards donning sheets.

I think police strikes are no bueno. Their job is too essential for them to strike.

"Any campaign world where an orc samurai can leap off a landcruiser to fight a herd of Bulbasaurs will always have my vote of confidence"

Police and other emergency services (EM Ts, Fire Departments, and IMO opinion doctors and nurses, though they are actually allowed to strike and hold their patients hostage) are generally considered essentially and forbidden to strike by law, which is the only sane approach.

Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.

And that is why you hear of "blue flu" or "working to rule" every so often—ways of putting pressure on without technically being on strike.

It's by Kotaku UK, but here's a review of Battlefield Hardline' singleplayer mode. In short, it sidesteps the issues of excessive force by simply not rewarding you much for shooting everyone. You get a lot more singleplayer experience points by arresting criminals instead.

I have disagreed with her a lot, but comparing her to republicans and propagandists of dictatorships is really low. - An idiot

Points that, according to the review, reward you more guns to not shoot people with.

The review also says it's more fun to go full Bad Cop and shoot anything that moves, and that the game is content to tacitly sit by and let you do that, with no actual drawbacks or penalties for being a trigger-happy gun cop.

Ultimately, I don't get the impression it's sidestepping anything. Criticism of the game is that it glorifies police militarization and cop-on-civilian gun violence. The nonlethal takedown rewards sound more like challenge awards than encouragement of such a playstyle, and when the game has absolutely no bones about players pulling a trigger on every perp they see, and when even the rewards for not doing so are better weapons to slaughter enemies with, it's hard to say that the criticism isn't 100% correct.

edited 17th Mar '15 7:01:04 AM by TobiasDrake

My Tumblr. Currently talking Dragon Ball and working my way back to Danganronpa V3.

I wonder how the game would go if you had to be a British Copper, played (semi-)realistically?

edited 17th Mar '15 7:14:17 AM by Greenmantle

Keep Rolling On

You'd spend most of your time taking bribes from the press.

“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran

Or filling in paperwork.

Keep Rolling On