Tension Between Policing And Democracy Research Paper

I do think that there are some inherent tensions between policing and democracy. I say this because policing is running in a way so that they are in power of the situation. People in today’s society view police both are support, but also as a threat because of all of the power they have over citizens. In a democratic society policing is subject to the rule of law by respecting human dignity, rather than putting their power first. Police must only intervene in citizens lives only in limited circumstances and must be publicly accountable. I believe that the tension occurs when police think that they are above the law. Citizens get upset when they know that police officers have more power than them and use it in a way to target individuals. For
Starting with the three systems of policing which are citizen policing, private policing, and public policing. I was aware that there were different cops, but I did not know that they were broken into three systems that have distinctive orders. Citizen policing was the one system that I was interested in because I did not realize how involved some citizens are in policing. Next, we learned about democratic policing. This is that the police strive for equal law enforcement by following the rule of law. If there was not democratic policing, then people would abuse their power. For example, after 9/11 happened in the United States the airports were a lot stricter, but especially those who are of Middle Eastern descent. Those who law enforcement believes are of middle Eastern descent are still discriminated against because of this event and it was not the entire group who committed the crime, but they still get treated as though they are terrorists. Then, I learned about the “broken window thesis”. Based on findings from Wilson and Keller, the “broken window thesis” is an experiment that crime results from neglect. In class the experiment was of a car with a broken antenna being left in an area that was considered to have high crime. The car was left and happened to get more and more damage to it because of the broken antenna. The idea of this experiment is to notice the small things. What Wilson and Kelling realized is that disorder creates fear, disorderly behavior signals that community does not care (which leads to worse disorder and crime), and to reduce disorder, fear, and crime you must rely on citizens for assistance and zero tolerance for disorder. Lastly, I learned about Lewis’s four changes that occurred in “surveillance society”. First, the individual’s body has become a site of struggle because it is