Media Violence Exposure, and Violent attitudes towards police.

Soulcorruptor

The corruptor of your soul
Veteran
Joined
Mar 28, 2007
Messages
2,630
Age
37
Gil
822
Cetra Coin
Andre the Adamantoise
Mortimer the Malboro
Terence the Tonberry
Accessory (Head)
Accessory (Arms)
FFXIV
Sileen Tebnerus
FFXIV Server
Lamia
Okay so with some recent threads that have been popping up here and due to a research paper I had to do in class, it got me thinking of seeing what people here think. So this thread can serve various functions. 1. Your opinion on the research paper itself. 2. Your opinion on the subject itself. And 3. Just overall discussion on the topic.

Ahead of time as a disclaimer this is a research paper I am posting that I did for school, so as such I had to let my research drive the data, I wasn't supposed to pick and choose my articles to try and arrive at a specific hypothesis, in fact in the research paper we try to disprove it on order to try and arrive at it, which is why we let the data drive everything. Sadly this was also written largely in one go, so some spots are patchy and my flow falls apart.





Review of Related Literature
Cell Phones, a mobile way to new violence
Media violence has been a thing since the induction of media itself.Whether it came from a newspaper, a radio, or the TV via a news channel. The introduction of the internet even sprung forth a new wave for it. We could now comes across it more easily through streaming sites and video sharing sites like YouTube or articles shared on Facebook. Though some of this may have caused a problem it could be monitored to a degree by parents perhaps limiting what their children did on the net, which helped lower some of their exposure to it, however one device now changes this and opens a wide door for exposure over all platforms and that is the cell-phone. Today's youth have unprecedented availability to electronic device that can record,take pictures, and have internet access.( Boyd and Sue 2016) These change the access to all forms of violence especially the kind that the younger generation can be exposed to. In the same article(Christakis) likes to point out that in contrast to fictional violence, that through the use of smart phones we can share all forms of violence. What we can take from this, is that prior to the release of mobile devices we were able to monitor to a degree our violence exposure and our children's exposure to it as well. Now with the release of mobile devices and the amount of youth that has or uses them, there is such a easy way to come across various forms of violence without being monitored.
Boyd and Sue further elaborate that the mobile exposure which can be captured and shared by youth can now be done without adult consent. This leads to various means that we could use to filter out the violence exposure by age groups now being bypassed. They also go to say that social networking sites and video sharing sites like Facebook and YouTube which have already been mentioned, can increase the violence exposure since it goes beyond geographic and school boundaries. When a child is on the internet a parent can set restrictions on what websites they can use by setting up a separate profile for them when the use the computer. They can also limit what they see on TV by limiting what they watch. Now with these mobile devices children can easily get around these monitoring methods since most phones now a days be default have internet access. So in their spare time they can go to any number of sites through a different profile since they are now not limited by computer monitoring and be exposed to various violence that was once being filtered by their parents.
(Boyd and Sue 2016) also look at studies that note first person shooter games and other fiction violence “Increase aggressive thought, feelings, and behaviors.” Only now to be replaced by fear distress, or victimization which comes from exposure to real violence through mobile devices. In part this is a very important outlook to consider, because of the two types of violence it mentions, fictional and real. With fictional violence most of us have some filter that we are able to separate from reality and know it's not how things work in the real world, though with the real violence we see through our mobile devices now there is the mindset that it is real and it can happen to us. Due to this change on mindset we can be more likely to change our behavior towards people especially if some type of agency's involved like the government or police.
Now that we mentioned a agency involvement and their portrayal in media with their actions we should take a look at another viewpoint.(Robben 2016) takes a slightly different approach to the medias exposure to violence. Instead of just looking solely at our ease of access to mobile devices, he looks at the progression of our technology overall. According to Antonius the activities that effects peoples daily lives, bodily integrity, and freedom of personal expression and self-hood are causes for increased violence by people overall. Examples he uses are the use of seamless surveillance systems, the tapping of e-mail traffic, permanent camera supervision and activity analyses of cars. This seems to look at our government overall and what they do to monitor us as a society for limiting our violence. With all these means of monitoring people feel like their liberties and choices are being limited and taken away from them. So in return they have increased agitation towards any authority figure overall that they may associate with the monitoring. More often then not this association is tied towards the police that people may act hostile towards. Now keeping this in mind let us look at some other reasons people may be hostile towards are police officers that are causes of monitoring. Though this will be a reverse cause in a sense of the citizen monitoring the police actions, through the use of mobile devices or cameras. These are used often now to record interactions that police have with us as citizens of this country, so what happens when these interactions are made available for all to see? This goes back to the various forms of media violence since these recording can now easily be shared on the internet.
CitizenMonitoring
(Auerbach 2017) Takes a different look at the media violence outlook and the effect it has on the police. He suggests that when videos are posted of when police are handling situations where they have to use violent force are often cut short, and as a result the mentality of police brutality is more common and blow out of proportion. When the reality is that police usually only have a split second to make a decision. Auberbac acknowledges that police brutality is truly an upsetting issue here in the United States and that the peoples trust in the police can be shaken at the thought of it. He also likes to point out that when most of these violent videos are shared one of three things are usually occurring.

  • Many cries of police brutality are that in which the person who wishes to avoid prosecution just say excessive force was used in their arrest.

  • Videos that are being shared may not fully capture what has happened, and in this case then what the alleged victim may have done, which can them being violent or

    Media violence and police 4
    uncooperative.
  • Some police brutality is from officers having to defend themselves or others from the violent behavior of the “victims”.
Because of this we should be wary with what we see online and ask ourselves if this is the full story and how many of the encounter(s)we have seen? Auerbach also explains how the automatic acceptance of these videos can hinder law enforcement from doing their job. If we just blindly keep believing that every encounter will be violent we in turn act violent ourselves, so we are only asking for them in return to have to escalate their force to do their job and as a result of this we keep a viscous cycle continuing.
Auerbach uses a study himself from (Sauby 2007) in this study itgoes to say that police violence is not as common as many of the people who are crying wolf about it tend to say. Sauby looks at the city of Chicago which has the largest number of complaints about it's uniformed officers and which so happens to be the second largest police force. In this study “Over a five-year period, from 1999 through 2004, the city saw about 1,774 complaints per year against members of the 13,500 member police force, with less than 5 percent of those officers receiving nearly half of those complaints. However,in that same study, only 1 percent of the over 10,000 complaints filled against the Chicago police officers between 2002 and 2004 were found to have enough evidence to sustain a case.” That 1 percent of the 10,000 would come to only 100 to put into perspective how many cases actually could go forth. One last fact that was also presented was that out of 100 full time officers the national average for police violence claims is only 9.5.
Taking those facts into mind and thinking more on what they mean we can infer somethings. One is that less then 10% of our officers nation wide receive excess violence complaints, and that a good portion that are brought forth may not even have proper evidence to actually be counted as a case. So of those complaints only 1 percent of claims seem to have enough evidence or cause for their to be a cause against the officer or department. What this means to us, is that while that 1 percent may be low enough we would want to focus on getting that 10 percent of claims being filled and trying to get it lower. On the flip side of this it may also mean that some case of police violence are greatly exaggerated and not as common as media would have is believe, it's just that when it happens we as a society and with our current trends with media make a big scene out of it.
Auerbach also likes to point out the huge divide between the actual number of complaints and charges of police violence and the number of cases that require disciplinary action. Some cases where a person comes into contact with police they are unwilling to comply which maybe a result to being mentally ill or substance abuse influence,regardless when confronted by police these victims tend to get rowdy and are difficult to control with normal means. In other cases very large tall or weight wise so in other words a heavy set person many tactics may need to be used to subdue them ranging form pepper spray to batons. When people of these size display this uncooperative behavior police have to be quick to react especially of the person proves to be a danger to themselves or others.
What we can begin to take away from this is that our police forces are at times thrust into very complicated situations where they have to make a decision and quickly to solve a situation. It can be said with the changing times they may not be properly equipped now to deal with some situations in a better way, but that does not automatically mean or lead to excessive force. So as we offer more training and other equipment to help deal with situations regarding the mentally ill or larger people, we can work on those situations as being seen as not using excessive force. A case Auerbach references for us is from (Hubert and Phua 2010) A mentally ill woman decided to steal ambulance van in California back in 2010. Her intention was to use it as a weapon in the police, we can only think from this fact that she intended to run them over most likely. The responding officers fired upon the ambulance and killed the woman, now while witnesses were quick to say excessive force was used, after a through investigation it was found they to make one of those split second, self defense decisions.
This further showcases that some people in our society are quick to over react to police violence and don't always look at the full situation. How else could the officers have stopped the vehicle? We may not know but the more important factor at that time was how many more people could have hurt after she dealt with the police. She may have stopped with just the police but she already showed some violent action and as such needed to be dealt with quickly.

Media Bias

News media can be said to be one of the largest ways violence gets circulated. Whether it be reports of a school shooting, our soldier sactions over seas,terrorists actions anywhere, and yes even suspected police violence. Now mostly news reporters remain unbiased and try to simply report the facts, but what happens when they don't? What happens when they take a side and start portraying police violence as something that is cold and uncaring, that they are doing it on purpose? It can be summed up in one word. A St. Louis, Missouri suburb, Ferguson.
(Rothman 2014) gives us an extensive look into this particular case,and one reason why media bias can cause a uproar. August 9[SUP]th[/SUP]2014 a date that shook the nation,. An 18 year old individual known as Michael Brown was shoot 6 times and left dead in the street by a police officer. Now what drew so much attention to this case was that the officer was white and Michael Brown was black, so once again racial ties and tensions sparked and were called into question. The treatment of minorities by police was called into question with renewed vigor. Our media highlighted everything and put a huge light on all of the protests violence and peaceful and the debates that arose from this situation. Rothman goes to say once the press arrived at the scene instead of just trying to report what was happening they inserted themselves into the action. By not only standing with the people who were protesting but acting like the polices attitudes painted a picture to exactly what happened with Michael Brown. Since the media was now involved in a personal level that could not portray a non-bias viewpoint and explore both sides for facts, instead rumors flew faster then the wind and conjecture spread like wildfire. Much of the
community insisted that Brown had his hands held up in a sign of surrender. What made this worse was that it appeared he was shoot in the back and by a member of the police force with no ties to that community. It was also being reported that the first responders didn't even show his body any proper respect, no attempts to cover up the body, perform any kind of medical aid or attempts to revive the body were made. These allegations spread all over and many were disproved but not before the damage was done, the media portrayed the police force as some sort of monster.
The media did little to help as protests that first started peaceful broke out into riots and violent actions of burning down many businesses. As police forces responded by calling riot police the media responded with a jarring headline “What you gonna do? Kill us all? From a New-York based website called the Daily Beast. Though while another media outlet from St. Louis also reported on events but focused instead on the results of the after math of the riot, only one grabbed the nations attentions, and that was the one that portrayed the riot police acting in an improper manner with some of the protesters. It also went as far to say that the riot police response only made the violence erupting in Ferguson worse due that people were having a fear of a militarized police force being imposed, and this fear was also due that things like this would happen due to the terrorists attacks that happened on 9/11. As the violence grew so did the police forces actions, instead of riot geart hey were now dressed in body armor from head to toe, and now instead of telling apart a peaceful protester and a rioter no distinction was being made, which in turn may have converted protesters into rioters.
Other impressions that are left with us and documented by Rothmanhow the media got out of hand is when two individual reporters from different news outlets were detained from failing to get out of a Mcdonald's that police forces were evacuating in a timely manner.Their arrest made headlines but one of them known as Lowery decided to take it further, he went on a talk show and decided to recount the events and say he was given “no way to avoid being arrested.”This only added fuel to the fire in Ferguson as more question about racial treatment started to arise. Now as days passed actions taken to help quell the situation tensions died down, but when tensions flared up once again the media found itself getting involved once again, but this time becoming part of the protesting. In some cases they were joining the picket lines and protesters themselves or getting to close to the police when filming thus enabling them not to go about their job in a sense able way.Others even goaded the police into controlling their actions as they joined protesters and needed to be shuffled along. Some would wonder why the police were acting in ways and their use of force when there wasn't a need for it in their eyes. It was only when they saw firsthand how quickly some crowds changed from protesting to rioting that they soon understood why the police responded how they did and after tensions died down later show some support to the police, but this defense would come to late. To even help diffuse the media from being involved officers even tried asking them to separate themselves from protesters but the request fell on deaf ears. Looking at all this we can assume to a degree that media has a high impact on how violence is controlled. When it comes to our own nations domestic issues with police and they themselves can't keep separated from it and instead get involved they pave way for tensions to keep going higher then they might naturally go without their involvement. (Lawerence 2000) Another case looking at how media can inspire violent actions towards police but this time in a lesser way, is the case with Rodney King another well known case. However let it be said that the officers in question were indeed guilty of brutality we are not concerned with their guilt, we are looking at how the media portrayed it and results leading to behavior toward police. After video footage of this savage beating surfaced in L.A. The media took great amount of liberties with some of it's headlines. While most of the headlines newspapers used can be considered appropriate there are few that can be considered to have negative out looks and a type of damnation or police overall which in turn would lead people to be more hostile towards them, especially since this seemed to spark more racial tensions. Such headlines to use as examples from March 7[SUP]th[/SUP]in the Los Angeles Times and an op-ed article “It's not just a few rotten apples”, from the New York Times as well on March 7[SUP]th[/SUP]“Tape of beating by police revives charges of racism”, and the last one again from the Los Angeles Times on April 4[SUP]th[/SUP]“Has the videotape of the King beating exposed a dirty little secret?” articles continued well into May of that year. The key thing to take from this is that our media outlets can over sensationalize these events, though while may be of great deal of importance and concern, the degree and length to which they keep reporting on an issue and only helps keep the flames running on an issue instead of letting us try to move on.
FalsePortrayal
So with all of the media's portrayal of violence what about the police itself, especially in the fictional sense? We see a great deal of police shows often in which violence is used so it is still fitting our question but in a roundabout way. When we look at fictional means it often shows police using force to solve any situation in a pleasing manner and also a clean way to wrap things up in a hour TV show, less if you cut out the commercials. Can these quick solve cases lead to an increased agitation when people have contact with the police only not to see an immediate solution to their problems? (Perlmutter 2000) looks at various things that TV media often gets wrong and gives 9 reasons as to how skewed this portrayal is, for this account topic and to save time we are going to list only 4 of them. His whole list can be found in “Policing the Media” Street Cops and Public Perceptions of Law Enforcement pages35-36. This study was conducted in the week of February 22-29 of 1972

  • Violent crime, especially murder, is over-represented on television, vis-a-vis murder in real life.
  • Whites are over-represented as perpetrators of crime. Blacks, young people, and lower-class individuals are underrepresented.
  • Little of the legal process is shown in television crime programs. On the TV, the legal
    Media violence and police 10
    process usually ends with arrest.
  • Whites are over-represented as victims of violent crime.
Another way TV shaped our perception of the police is just by the amount of TV we watch and how many people watch it. (Donovan and Klahm IV) have looked at multiple studies that suggest that society as a whole gathers it's impressions of police not from their own interactions but rather what they view on TV actually. Their look at(Surette, 2007) states that “media exposure has been cited as a more influential factor in shaping Americans' fear of crime than direct experience.” This can be supported by their look into the study of (Chiricos, Padgett, & Gertz, 2000) which noted that on average Americans of age 15 and older watched 2.8 hours of TV daily.They then link those studies to police brutality as well saying that the Americans that have more media exposure and as such hear stories about police brutality believe it to be more common place than those who have less media exposure.

Relatingto the Literature Research
The objective of this research is to look at all our media outlet sand how they portray and expose us to violence and in return see if this affects our attitudes towards our police officers. If we can determine if there is a connection than as cases come forth we may learn as a society and getting this exposure through second hand means since we are not at the source, (ie, it is happening to us)then we may also limit our attitudes and reactions since we may not know the full scope of the situation. This in turn would hopefully lead us to want learn all the facts first before we jump the gun and have hostile attitudes towards our police officers.
 
Last edited:
This is fairly balanced.

I too have my concerns. With ready access to videos thanks to mobile phones, the internet, etc, kids are accessing material which their parents can’t monitor as easily. But even with adults it can be a concern. On the one hand it can be a great thing to have videos exposing what is happening on the streets, at protests, etc, but on the other hand certain clips can be misleading due to selective editing (or sometimes just a result of the person recording the footage missing important parts of it). The beginnings of altercations are often not present in these videos, leaving only the apparently unwarranted police brutality. The end result is an angry response from the viewer.

Sometimes it does seem that police use excessive force. It shocks me how readily police seem to act with aggression, but we also need to understand that we do not always have all of the facts to hand. We see the videos and react emotionally to them and it feels right, but we don’t always really know what happened before and after. It is always worth bearing that in mind.

And in the many cases where police genuinely have acted excessively and have killed / injured someone for a reason which seems pointless and unnecessary (racially motivated or otherwise), we should be wary of making it a war against the police as a whole – many of whom are doing a good job and are interested in keeping their communities safe. We don't see videos of police behaving properly because they don't tend to be interesting enough to go viral.

I believe that a police force is necessary. It needs to be held accountable for horrific acts, but to taint the entire system with the same brush is a simplification which should cause alarm.

Even if there is a problem with racism within the police force, it certainly isn’t with all police officers, and assumptions should not be made that all ‘pigs’ need to get roasted. This sort of thinking is dangerous and I can't see how it can help the situation.
 
Back
Top