How Media Affects The Criminal Justice System

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The media in our society nowadays is huge and is still growing. It has a huge impact on the criminal justice system, but how does it affect the justice system in today's world? It affects the justice system in many ways, some of those being positive as well as negative. The media’s existence has changed how law enforcement operates significantly compared to when it did not exist. Social media has changed the way law enforcement communicates information, as well as how it receives important information from the public. We see law enforcement engaging with the media in many ways, by answering questions from the media about problems that have occurred or giving a statement about a problem that has happened. We also see people use the media to …show more content…

An article done by UP University Press referenced a study done by the Justice Policy Center found that forms of media like Twitter or Facebook have made people more aware of incidents dealing with the police as well as public perception by a lot and has changed due to seeing officers actions on video (Gabriela Quintero, 2024). While these make social media sound completely positive, it is not all completely positive and has its negatives. The reality is that communicating with the media requires a high amount of professionalism from the police, and this can be very difficult to maintain because of the high pressure from the situation being discussed. Another challenge that law enforcement faces with the media is that sometimes the media can put themselves in danger when trying to get a story, which makes it harder for officers because it ends up falling on the police to protect them. There was a study done by Pew Research showing that 54% of Americans do believe that social media makes it harder for the police to do their job (Menasce et …show more content…

The first video example done by LiveNOW from Fox will cover a shooting that happened in Philadelphia. We get to see the commissioner of police give his statement as well as answer questions from the media. We see in this video that the police initially begin their statement by saying thank you to everyone and to fellow officers who were there during the incident, and give an official statement about what happened. We see that the commissioner retains high professionalism by staying calm and speaking, respectful, and strong, as well as giving important information and details to the media about the tragic accident from what they currently know (LiveNOW From FOX, 2023). Continuing onto the next example, we will cover a tragic incident where Akron Police Officer Ryan Westlake shot a teen who was carrying a toy gun in Ohio. At the beginning of the video, we see someone saying that this officer needs to be fired over the tragic incident that has happened. The video continues further by showing the body camera footage where the teen was shot. This has sparked uproar from an activist group called Freedom Block to get the officer fired from the force because of the

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