Throughout the past century, ongoing changes in police methodology and laws relating to how the police may do their jobs, as well as the technology allowing such changes to be implemented, have led to overall improvements in the public’s understanding and empathy for the police.
Prior to the Great Depression in the thirties, the media (radio, newspapers, a few local magazines, books, and pre-talkie movies) focused on a limited amount of news and pure entertainment. During the first thirty years of the century, movies tended to be like little novels, telling exotic stories and preaching values and norms. There was little congruence between what was broadcast over the radio or written in books about police work, and actual police and their activities. Newspapers and magazines focused on good news and fashions, or on high society. Little was known at that point of crime and criminals until the Stock Market Crash in 1929.
During the thirties, forties and fifties, movies about gangsters created stereotypes of police and criminals that had an effect not only on the views of the public about the police, but the views of their jobs by the cops themselves. Once television became omnipresent during the sixties and seventies, it brought events such as the civil rights battles, the riots every summer, the anti-war activities, right into people’s living rooms.
Stories about how the police did or did not do their jobs, who they were and what they were doing, made them much more noticeable to the public.
Today, since cop shows are one of the most popular TV entertainment venues, they permeate the attitudes of the public, and of the cops themselves, toward the job of the police.
The media watch everything the police do and report it all, mostly focusing on the bad. Many problems that occur within police departments are first brought to the attention of the police hierarchy through the media. The ability of today’s media to present events, often as they are happening, influences the manner in which the police must do their jobs.
The problems of corruption in the police, lack of training, inefficiency, racial profiling, brutality, have all been covered in the media during the century. Articles, and books such as “The Jungle,” yellow journalism and shock journalism, have all helped to focus the public’s attention on the police, sometimes having a detrimental effect and often leading directly to changes in policy and procedures.
Laws have been changing a great deal over the century, and those that affect the police and the court system have been changed as well. “Crimes of the Century,” such as the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, and “Trials of the Century,” such as the O. J. Simpson trial, had massive effect on police procedures, whether for good or bad.
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In the early years of the twentieth century, police departments were inefficient, ineffective, and generally based on the political “buddy system.” Cops had little training and almost no education, and laws were enforced arbitrarily. The common citizen expected little from the police department; the police were definitely not our friends, but were sometimes our enemies. The general perception of a cop was of an uneducated thug who had power over one’s life, and therefore must be feared and respected. Until the thirties, people generally avoided seeking out the police for help.
It wasn’t until after World War One that the image of the police began to change. Soldiers returning from the war with military training often influenced police departments to implement these methods into their working lives, and a new, more effective paramilitary police organization was born. During the Great Depression, police departments became even more focused on maintaining the status quo, and not so much on crime-fighting. There were so many people out of work, so many homeless and small, petty crimes, that people with money tended to turn their faces away from such problems to avoid seeing them. So the police saw their jobs as more to keep everything looking normal, letting the public avoid seeing the crime that was going on. The thirties saw a rise in bank robberies and train-robberies, and the police had to begin developing systems to combat this. It was then that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was created.
World War Two took many young men off to war, but the country’s crime rate went down and more women moved into the police department. These women were social workers, rather than hard-nosed cops, and those police who stayed at home were older and had to become more efficient. Later, when the soldiers returned with even more military training than in the last war, as well as experience with other countries and other police departments, police cultures changed yet again. Women were forced out of the police, or were relegated to more support roles, after having had a taste of real responsibility and power. And as a result of the GI Bill, there were more people receiving college educations, thereby raising the standards of police departments everywhere and, in general, improving the public’s perception of the police. The job of police officer became more of a profession, increasingly respected and valued in the community.
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During the sixties, the growth of civil unrest was broadcast on national television, along with the police responses (e.g., southern integration efforts, the Chicago Democratic Convention, the Sharon Tate/Charles Manson Murders), and portrayed the police as irresponsible, brutal and vicious, clarifying for the nation the violence inherent in the police system. New laws arose with the effort to respect suspects’ rights, as well as victims’ rights. Often, these rights led to the public’s belief that suspects were given more rights than victims. New laws, such as the Miranda Warning and others, put more and more restrictions on the police, once again changing the face of police activity.
In the seventies, all the new laws enacted during the sixties began taking effect. Along with these new laws came changes that brought more integration and more personal and professional responsibility into the police department. There was an explosion of minorities entering the police force, and lawsuits against police departments for the first time, forcing them to integrate. More and better training of police officers was required, including early sensitivity and race relations training, resulting in a police department that more accurately reflected the racial balance of local communities. Women, as a direct result of the feminist movement of this time, were given patrol duties and other responsibilities almost equal to those of their male counterparts.
Title VII required that women be allowed to go into the same career fields as men, and women were resolute that they would do so. Police departments had to change some of their entrance requirements, such as age and height. There were contentions by some male cops that women were too small, too slight, too unqualified to handle the violent, physically challenging work required of police officers, but every challenge placed on them resulted in some women somewhere meeting and overcoming that challenge, until eventually the laws were revised to allow women to qualify as police officers.
The eighties and nineties consolidated these earlier years, adding more comprehensive testing efforts and a new awareness within the police culture itself as to how the police were doing their jobs. There were scandals such as the Rodney King brutality trial in April 1992, which led directly to a number of changes in the ways police departments dealt with mob control and other problems.
After the devastating events of September 11, 2001, the media were once again referring to the police as heroes, rather than as semi-criminals and incompetents. Police officers gained in the respect of the society overall. Since fears of terrorism have begun pervading our society, more people than ever have expressed a willingness to give up their rights and privacy for the “homeland security.”
When the problem of corruption again came to the forefront of our consciousness (e.g., kickbacks in LA, cover-ups in San Francisco, accusations of authoritarian police culture in Oakland), people were discouraged and angry; it was felt that the police were expected to set a higher standard and, like Caesar’s wife, should be above reproach.
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To conclude, over the past century, improvements in methodology, in the laws relating to police actions, and in the field of forensics, as well as the technology that would allow these changes to be implemented, have resulted in an overall improvement in the public’s perception and empathy for the police.
