Nationally, Police Get Good Marks From Citizens; Locally, We’ll Soon Find Out
Last week, the Milwaukee Fire and Police Commission announced that it would conduct its first survey of citizen satisfaction with the police. The results should provide us with helpful new ways to evaluate the Milwaukee Police Department’s performance and identify areas in need of improvement.
Unfortunately, media coverage provides a very distorted picture of police-citizen interactions. What makes the news, of course, are the incidents in which officers become violent or exhibit extreme callousness. When video is available of such incidents, as is increasingly common, the disturbing images may be repeated endlessly on TV or circulate virally on social media. Viewers may be left with the impression that such incidents are the norm. However, the vast majority of police-citizen interactions occur without anything newsworthy happening. Among other things, the Fire and Police Commission’s new survey should give us a much better sense of what happens in the more routine interactions and how those interactions affect public perceptions of the police.
Although data of this sort have not been available for Milwaukee specifically, the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics did sponsor a national survey in 2011 regarding police-citizens interactions. The results, released in two reports earlier this fall, indicate a remarkably high level of citizen satisfaction, even among the minority groups who seem to bear the brunt of the high-profile incidents of police misconduct.
It was ten years ago to this very day, at the age of 28, that I heard the words from my doctor that I’ll never forget: “You have cancer.” It’s news that shakes you to your core, even if you were expecting the diagnosis. While I had a very treatable form of cancer — testicular cancer — I couldn’t help but face my mortality head-on. In the hours after my diagnosis, I remember thinking about all of the things I still wanted to do in my life: get married and have kids; pursue a career as a law professor; celebrate more Lakers and Dodgers championships; etc.
Many thanks to our October guests, Jonathan Fritz ’09 and 3L Brittany Kachingwe. Our November blogger will be 3L Christopher Flowers. Chris is from Albany, New York, where he worked in both houses of the New York State legislature, and he is interested in securities- and tax-related litigation.