Police Brutality Research Paper

Zemmouri 1

Samir Zemmouri
Mr.Mccoy
English 9 Period 7
15 May 2015

The Distortion of Police Brutality in Today’s
Media
We constantly see it in the news, “People rioting, demanding police reform” or the popular, “Who is policing police brutality?”. But if we look past the headlines, we will see that police brutality is nothing but a modern day myth. Media today is nothing more than a business with multiple companies competing against each other for higher ratings. With this in mind we have to consider what will pull in more viewers, and that is showing things that will catch peoples eyes and attention. So this will result in disproportion of coverage and encouragement of violence for money, of course this comes at the cost of the people that serve on the streets of our
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In the United States today there are about 670,439 police officers serving in our streets
(FBI 2012 count). In the last U.S. Census (2012) taken there was and estimated 313,000,000 total people in the country (This includes immigrants). To put that into perspective there are about 2½ police officers for every 1,000 people in the country. This 0.22% is expected to enforce the law for the rest of the citizens and in a Bureau of Justice report from 2011 and estimated fifty­three million had contact with police (This contact had occurred in 2008 however). The criteria for police contact fall under: Verbal Warnings, Fines, Citations, Being Pulled over, Consensual police calls, and of course Being Arrested. This is also assuming that these encounters to these

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For this to be put into perspective you are 9 times more likely to be murdered (FBI 2012 Murder Report on Murders in 2011), you are
20 times more likely to die in a car accident (2012 NHTSA report on car crashes in 2011), and
52 times more likely to be raped (FBI 2012 Murder Report on Rapes in 2011). it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it it

Now that we have seen the the facts on the police brutality it would leave you to question why the media would distort the image of cops serving on our streets? Well the answer is simple, all the news companies that report the riots as a result of supposed brutality all get jumps in ratings. On an average day CNN averages 150 thousand views and FOX news averages about
200 to 300 thousand viewers. When the Baltimore riots were happening the CNN and FOX news ratings broke passed 1 million FOX at one point broke passed 2.5 million viewers (adweek scoreboard). This means that all these news networks had made more money. So with this in mind one would have to believe that news companies would make more compelling headlines and show more dramatic images to make more money. This is mere exploitation of