Police brutality

Perceptions of police brutality:

This research investigated whether the perceived level of force (categorized as justifiable force, moderate force, or excessive force) used by a law enforcement officer in effecting an arrest or detention changes depending on whether the audio track was present or removed from the arrest video. Participants were each shown 5 arrest videos with either the audio feed intact or removed. Participants were asked to indicate whether they felt the use of force depicted in the video was justified, moderate, or excessive. There was a significant association between audio presence or absence for 3 of 5 use of force videos. For 2 of 3 arrest videos with significant associations, participants perceived the violence as less severe when the audio track was removed. For the remaining video, removal of the audio track increased the percentage of participants who found the use of force to be excessive. The current data suggest that by removing the audio feed from arrest videos, the justifiability of use of force incidents can be manipulated. These data are an indication of the malleability of perceptions and judgments, and they serve to motivate future research in this area as we seek to understand, and thus tackle, the issue of police use of force incidents.(PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved)

The occupational or work-related problems of the police can be studied from several perspectives. One can analyze the psychological, physiological, and sociological effects on the police officer because of his membership in this high stress occupation. For example, in addition to such obvious occupational problems as high rates of su***de, alcoholism, and divorce (eg, Blackmore, 1978; Dash & Reiser, 1978; Dunne, 1978), the police officer often experiences problems in his social relationships with those not of his occupation. One can also examine problematic and deviant work-related behavior patterns of police officers. This study will follow this perspective and provide a descriptive analysis of the deviant behavior (norm violating) patterns of police officers, specifically those forms of deviant behavior which occur during the course of" normal" work activities, ie, police occupational deviance.