Being an effective leader in Law Enforcement is becoming an ever adaptive and challenging new experience for the new generations of Law Enforcement management. The ideal books of Law Enforcement management past are in many ways outdated even if they are from just a couple of years past. The job of current Law Enforcement is to be a mental health professional, Lawyer, Doctor and Navy Seal depending on the situation and there is little room for mistakes. Mistakes will be displayed on cable news media over every channel in every news media organization and there will be no understanding that mistakes can happen.
Effective police leaders become adept at responding to challenge. Like other organizations, police agencies must balance constancy and predictability with adaptation and change. Even as they strive to standardize operations, most police leaders recognize the fluid context in which their agencies operate. They also understand that there are forces to which police organizations must adapt and evolve in order to remain effective in a changing world. It is those forces that drive organizational change and create new models for conducting the business of policing.-Harvard Kennedy School
The largest and biggest fight that leadership in Law Enforcement has is with the News Media. The countless number of news articles that have been purposely manufactured or altered in order to fit a narrative have gone from far and few between, to often and problematic. The fact is that Police misconduct brings the viewers to the TV, and the News Media organizations have an obligation to their stockholders to produce ratings. Police Officers seem to be the collateral damage to a new media cycle that needs viewership.
Fake news and social media posts are such a threat to U.S. security that the Defense Department is launching a project to repel “large-scale, automated disinformation attacks,” as the top Republican in Congress blocks efforts to protect the integrity of elections.
One of the Pentagon’s most secretive agencies, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), is developing “custom software that can unearth fakes hidden among more than 500,000 stories, photos, video and audio clips.”The RollingStone
Multiple Police agencies around the country have also started suing popular news organizations for deformation of character lawsuits due to poor and fabricated news stories that shed Police Officers in a bad light. It is not argued that if a Police Officer makes a mistake that is a mistake of heart, or of moral judgment then they should be punished. Police Officers that do make mistakes of policy or law are punished quicker and faster than their civilian counter parts. Even now if you were to research convictions of police officers you will be bombarded with news about racial injustices regardless of what you type into the search engine. This again is based on what articles will receive views based on clicks and viewership. The relationship between the popular news media and what has been deemed “Fake News,” stories is not hard to understand but regardless of why it happens it still does not make it justifiably moral. The utter fascination with Police and Media has been documented frequently and throughout decades.
Western society is fascinated with crime and justice. From films, books, newspapers, magazines, television broadcasts, to everyday conversations, we are constantly engaging in crime "talk". The mass media play an important role in the construction of criminality and the criminal justice system. The public’s perception of victims, criminals, deviants, and law enforcement officials is largely determined by their portrayal in the mass media. Research indicates that the majority of public knowledge about crime and justice is derived from the media (Roberts and Doob, 1990; Surette, 1998). Therefore, it is imperative to examine the effects that the mass media have on attitudes toward crime and justice. The purpose of this research is to examine how the media influences audience perceptions of police effectiveness and to examine whether media consumption is related to fear of crime and punitive justice attitudes.-JCJPC
The main reason that the media fight is the largest fight that leaders of Law Enforcement have enough to deal with on a daily basis and dealing with false narratives can be a lose lose situation. Some of the current false narratives have sparked some of the largest political movements of our time. Movements that whether you believe in their cause or not and clouded in the fact they stem from a largely false narrative produced by popular new media outlets.
I do not believe anyone is doubting how hard Police work can be but when obvious and blatant lies can be spread by New Media outlets before they are researched in order to be the first with the new flashy news story then everyone suffers. The fact is in the end those that trusted the news and believed in something false end up becoming the true victims by doubting the ones trying to help them in the first place. Not all news media stories are a lie and not all Police Officers and liars but we all suffer when any one of those is true.
References
Batts, Anthony W. New Perspectives in Policing - Ncjrs.gov. Harvard Kennedy School,
https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/238338.pdf.
Taibbi, M. (2019, September 5). The Pentagon Wants More Control Over the News. What Could Go Wrong? Retrieved from https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/darpa-fake-news-internet-censorship-879671/.
Media consumption and public attitudes toward crime and ... (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.victimsclearinghouse.nsw.gov.au/Pages/victims_clearinghouse_research_db/victimscleatinghouse_researchdatabase_criminal_justice_system/victimsclearinghouse_researchdatabase_cjs_dowler.aspx.
Alessandro Volta
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