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Question: Find this article: Full-text: Article Measuring ethics: when tensions rise, police officers who l...

Find this article: Full-text: Article Measuring ethics: when tensions rise, police officers who learn and live their ethics will continue to set the pace….by Tim Pardue. Found in Law Enforcement Technology, 42.5 (May 2015) p6. Word Count: 821.

Read the article, and in the discussion forum, respond to the following questions. Remember to be persuasive use facts and logic in your response. Identify the sources of information that you use, and try to dig deeper into the issue than simply drawing general conclusions from specific incidents.

What does the article and its source have to say about the way the public views the ethics of police officers as compared to the other professions listed?

Do you think that the news media is responsible for creating a disproportionately negative view of police officers?

Why do you think that people seem to more willing to publicly protest the actions of police officers but not the actions of those who they view, according to the survey that was done, as being significantly less ethical?

Answer 1

Note: This response is in UK English, please paste the response to MS Word and you should be able to spot discrepancies easily. You may elaborate the answer based on personal views or your classwork if necessary.

(Answer) (A) What does the article and its source have to say about the way the public views the ethics of police officers as compared to the other professions listed?

The article talks about how the police profession has been contaminated with unethical and downright unlawful behaviour in the recent years. However, almost any field will have a heterogeneous array of individuals that are either lawful, dishonest, assiduous, honourable etc.

According to the author’s beliefs, there are more ethical police officers than there are unethical ones. He goes on to talk about how a certain survey in the year 2014 mentioned that people felt that the police force was more ethical than the clergy. The author blames poor reporting standards by the media as one of the major causes as to why police officers have been receiving a bad reputation.

(B) Do you think that the news media is responsible for creating a disproportionately negative view of police officers?

In this paper, the author talks about how the media is responsible for reporting all or some information about a particular occurrence. The audience, in turn, formulates opinions and generalisations about what they have just absorbed from the news.

The author then goes on to talk about how the case of Michael Brown and Eric Garner resulted in the indictment of no police officer. That is because once the details were analysed, there seemed to be no unethical behaviour from the officers involved. The author says that, if the media reports were accurate about the details of the situation, this confusion wouldn’t have taken occurred in the first place.

(C) Why do you think that people seem to more willing to publicly protest the actions of police officers but not the actions of those who they view, according to the survey that was done, as being significantly less ethical?

According to the author, people seem willingly protest the actions of the police more because the people are not entirely familiar with the workings of the police department. The author says that Congress and salesmen are viewed as a lot less reliable than police officers. Yet, these professions are protested as much as police officers. Again, the author believes that the media distorts the actions of the police officers by reporting the half-truth through biased lenses.

According to the author, police officers are continuously trained in ethics at their time in the academy. He also says that some police officers have additional degrees in ethics. He believes that if the police were open to the media coming in to report their working in an unbiased manner, the public would be able to better understand how the force works and the ethical standards they maintain.