Police Deviance: A Problem With Police Brutality

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Deviance is described as behavior that is not part of the norms in society. Police officers today are held to high standards due to their motto " To protect and Serve," however, not all police personnel live up to that standard. Due to police officers being held at such high standards, as authority figures some of them tend to abuse their power and engage in police deviance. Police officers have the widest range of deviant acts. These acts of Police Deviance include, police brutality, police gratuity, police shakedowns, police perjury, police profanity, police misuse of confidential information, and police drinking and abusing drugs on or off duty, just to name a few (Policecrimes.com, 2015). However, Police Brutality has to be the most …show more content…

One of the primary reasons being the fact that police departments are not required to report incidents of abuse at the federal level (Reisenwitz, 2015). Another reason why police brutality is a problem is because most departments do not provide adequate training in nonviolent solutions. Therefore, without this specific training, police officers are less likely to view violence as their last resort (Kristian, 2015). Nevertheless, as stated in Seven Reasons Why Police Brutality Is Systemic, Not Anecdotal, police deviance is a problem because consequences for misconduct are minimal. It has also been stated that in central New Jersey ninety-nine percent of police brutality complaints are never investigated, and only one out of every three accused cops are convicted nationwide. Meanwhile civilian convictions are double that(Kristian, 2015). Believe it or not, In Chicago, the numbers are even more skewed: It has been reported that there were 10,000 abuse complaints filed against the Chicago PD between 2002 and 2004, and just 19 of them ”resulted in meaningful disciplinary action (Kristian, 2015).” According to USA Today, due to juries being conditioned to believe cops, on a national level, upwards of 95 percent

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