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You will prepare and submit a term paper on The Role of Media in Reporting Cases of Police Brutality

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You will prepare and submit a term paper on The Role of Media in Reporting Cases of Police Brutality. Your paper should be a minimum of 1750 words in length. Media coverage of alleged police brutality is very damaging to the police force, as it dents its public image even when it later turns out that the accusations were false. On the other hand, without media coverage and exposure to alleged police brutality, there might be no sufficient pressure on government institutions to prosecute their own for their misconduct (Walker, Spohn, and Delone 12). The activists, victims, victims’ families, and communities where police brutality has been witnessed agree that the media has a tendency of only reporting sensational reports of police brutality and ignoring everyday reports of police brutality. Many activists accuse the media and the police of racial profiling of victims where whites are portrayed, as sympathetic victims and non-whites as aggressors who provoke the police into violence. Most activists and victims accuse the media of relying on police records for their investigative media coverage of victims of police brutality, which undermines the media’s function as an agent of information transparency (Walker, Spohn, and Delone 123). Politicians use salient negative events such as police brutality cases to further their political agendas. They do this through staged media events, which are used to manipulate public opinion so that they are perceived as genial, community-conscious, and ethical. The lack of continual coverage by the media encourages the negative culture of police brutality because there is no pressure on the relevant stakeholders to ensure prosecution and, therefore, many cases are left unresolved. The other problem of police brutality is also very difficult to monitor, as most databases are state-specific and not centralized, which makes it more difficult to monitor trends of persecutions and convictions in the whole country.

The data for police brutality is hard to come by according to FBI Director James B. Comey in a&nbsp.February speech he gave in 2015 because the reporting of incidents is voluntary, which makes it hard to decipher trends.