Media Vs. Police

This academic journey began in the classroom and highlights some of the issues in a society where minority criminal justice students who observed police use of force incidents on various media, are perceived to be either abandoning their criminal justice studies or deviating from their original goals of uniformed police service after their perceptions of police use of force incidents. Dr. White began studying the impact of social media on minority criminal justice students after witnessing some of his own student’s responses to the Michael Brown incident in Ferguson, Missouri. The results of the study were unexpected but did enforce the idea that media and social media does in fact have an impact on minority criminal justice students, and could reinforce the hypothesis that as a result there could potentially be an impact on police recruitment pools of minorities.