Prejudical Views of Police Officers
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According to Aronson, Wilson and Akert (1998), there are approximately 500,000 police officers in the United States plus 220,000 support employees. The police are citizen's first link with America's criminal justice system and although they should be free of ethnic or racial bias, Aronson, Wilson and Akert report that many police officers throughout the country hold prejudicial views of ethnic minorities. Here, prejudicial views are defined as consisting of: a) a sense of being superior to members of a minority group; b) feelings that minorities are by their nature different or alien; c) a sense that dominant group members have proprietary claims on privilege, power and prestige; and d) a fear and suspicion that members of the minority have designs on dominant group benefits. It is further noted that while there are many ways in which people will evidence their prejudicial views, in the cases of police officers, this will frequently manifest itself in terms of harassing minorities such as frequent and unneeded stopping and searching of minority citizens. The purpose of this paper is to design a study that explores public opinions of police harassment. In particular, the proposed research is designed to examine whether public disapproval of police officers in a large city increases as a function of increases in their perception of police as harassing minorities. While there is no criminal theory that addresses police harassment of minorities, Hewston
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, there are several advantages associated with using the stratified random sample in survey research. First, the stratified random sample assures representativeness of not only the overall population of the city, but also key subgroups of the population, especially small minority groups. Thus comparisons can be made of the opinions of the dominant white group in relation to the city's minorities. Another benefit associated with stratified random sampling, according to Aleck and Settle (1994), is that it will generally have more statistical precision than simple random sampling. If the strata or groups are homogeneous, it can be expected that the variability within groups will be lower than the variability for the population as a whole. Stratified sampling capitalizes on that fact.
Instrumentation
The research instrument that will be used in the study will be a modified version of the of the KAET Public Opinion Poll used by Merrill and Phelps (1998) in their investigation of how Arizona voters feel about discrimination in the state. Co-sponsored by KAET-TV and the Cronkite School of Journalism and Telecommunication at Arizona State University, the poll contains a number of highly structured questions about both general discrimin
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1966
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)
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