Devin Conboy

April 16 2015
Mr. Benjamin Dudley
Why the Police Department isnt as Corrupt as the Media Portrays

Recently, there has been a disturbing trend in the media lately,

with the accusations and evidence that Police, Sheriffs Departments,
and even Federal law enforcement agencies act and carry out
unethical, and even sometimes prejudicial and racist behaviors and
actions. With the popularity of smart phones, as well as the medias
ability to break a story almost instantaneously after it happened by
reporting and even showing raw video evidence to support that
report, accusations of police corruption have been on the rise lately in
the past year or two.
Examples from incidents such as the Eric Garner death, the
Michael Brown shooting, and even recently with the shootings by
reserve deputy Robert Bates in Oklahoma and Officer Michael Slager in
Charleston, are beginning to paint a picture of police brutality and
corruption rampant across the United States. Mainstream media of
course paints this picture.
With all the negative media attention that recently came to light,
are the Nations police departments and law enforcement actually as
corrupt as these videos and stories lead us to believe? This is where

the line between interpretation and actuality begins to blur; the one
thing the media is good at is stirring the pot, or reporting for
numbers, by only showing the negative stories that would generate
the most interest and revenue.
With 5 or so major news stories in the spotlight in the past couple
of months, it only makes sense for the public to look around and
automatically assume that law enforcement across the country is now
finally getting caught, and that all law enforcement is in a sort of
crisis mode in order to stay out of the spotlight and hide their
corrupt practices. Unfortunately, what a large group of the public
doesnt realize is that the media works on its own agenda. The media
is not just in the business of informing the public; theyre in the
business of making money. For example, according to the Pew
Research Center, digital advertisement revenue in 2013 accounted for
almost 43 billion dollars worth of revenue. Newspaper print revenue is
declining rapidly, leaving digital advertisement as the major source of
revenue left for most media. (1) Its only natural that in order to make
money, if a news story breaks, then the media will hype it up, as well
as report story after story about the same incident or topic.
For example, in 2014, Ebola outbreaks were a hot topic for the
media. Weekly new stories would come out about the spread of Ebola
in Africa, or very small isolated incidents of a person infected with
Ebola who were quarantined in America. After a few months, the media

barely reports on it, even though it still remains a big issue in Africa.
Another big topic that the media profited from was ISIS. ISIS has been
around for years, yet the media only started to report major stories on
it last year when the US started to get involved. The US and other
coalition countries are still today involved in combating ISIS, and ISIS is
still spreading across the middle east, yet today its hard to go on a
major news source and find a top story about it. It seems today, the
biggest topic that the media has moved to is Police Brutality and
Corruption.
While the media paints the picture of rampart corruption across
the nation, the actual numbers concerning it are in fact the opposite.
According to the latest Census of State and Local Law Enforcement
Agencies, since 2008, there are more than 1.3 million people employed
by state, federal, and local law enforcement agencies. (2) This, of
course, is a large amount of people employed by law enforcement
agencies. According to a 2010 Police Misconduct Report study
conducted by the Cato Institute, the current projected police
misconduct rate is estimated to be 977.88 officers per 100,000
officers. After tracking reports of police misconduct, including sexual
harassment or assault, excessive force, theft, and other incidents, the
calculated misconduct rate among police officers is estimated to be .
9%. (3)Unfortunately, the media superficially inflates this number,
focusing on major incidents.

This, naturally, leads to a negative public reaction towards law

enforcement. Of course,