It seems like you can’t go anywhere lately without hearing something about how cops are “corrupted” or “biased.” Whenever a story about a rough arrest comes on the news, people can be so quick to say, “Oh, the cop got on this person because they’re (insert race here) (insert gender here). They’re so biased!!”
The reality of most situations is that cops don’t cruise around and just happen to stumble upon a crime in progress. Most times that your local police are on a scene, it’s because citizens call them there. A citizen, just like you and I, call the emergency or non-emergency number to alert police to a crime, calling them to the scene. So, if the police are so biased against a certain demographic of people… doesn’t that really mean that the citizens that are calling police on certain situations are biased? As stated, as stated earlier, it’s hugely unlikely that a cop just so happens to find a crime going on.
Crime being reported, though, is somewhat up to officer discretion. For example, a fist fight in a “bad neighborhood” likely won’t get a cop’s attention, but in a “good neighborhood”, people could even spend an amount of time in jail for a fistfight. So while most cops aren’t biased, any cop in the world will say they hate filling out paperwork. So the few crimes that are up to the officer’s discretion could be exaggerated or not reported at all. If you’d like to consider that “bias,” that’s fair.
What about crime, though? It’s all we ever hear about in the news, and so much of America believes that it’s our biggest threat. Of course, crime rates are skyrocketing and we need to protect ourselves, right? Well… not exactly. According to the FBI’s website, there were 15,119,800 arrests made in all of America in 1995. In 2014 (because the data from the entirety of 2015 is not yet readily available), the total number arrests in America went down to 11,205,833. That’s a pretty significant jump, especially considering our population. The population of America, as of 2014, is 318.9 million. For a moment, lets round that to 319 million people. So, in 2014, 3.5% of America’s population was arrested for something- anything from murder to petty theft. That’s compared to 5.7% in 1995, considering the population of 266.3 million. Assuming we continue to follow the trend, arrests in 2015 and 2016 will likely go down.
So, if the number of arrests have gone down, why is it all that we hear about anymore? A great deal of that is the fact that news stations are companies, and they get higher ratings from the public, and more views if they report the ugliness in society. Crimes have a much brighter spotlight than anything else that happens, with the exception of the latest election drama. So, it makes sense that crime and gore and corruption are all that you hear about- it keeps a news station’s viewers and ratings.
The overall reality is that the great majority of cops are not biased. There are three main systems of reporting crime (Uniform Crime Report, Bureau of Justice Statistics, and Self Report), which, when put together, give a pretty accurate number, as they all balance each other out. Crime rates are consistently falling- any government report will show you that.
