Tyler Goucher
Reporter
April 8, 2015
Filed under News, Bakersfield College: The Renegade Rip
Newspaper
Recently in the United States, there has been an uprising of
police brutality, or at least that’s what the media is portraying.
It has become very popular for these media organizations to
flood the airways with fear-mongering material aimed at sparking controversy
and backlash, often times only shedding light on the victim’s perspective,
rather than giving the viewer an overall unbiased look at what’s really the
root cause of most of these violent incidents.
In a recent interview with police Sgt. Joe Grubbs, public
information officer for the Bakersfield Police Department, he had some
insightful things to say about these recent events.
“What is going on in our nation is the narrative is putting
all the blame on the police. There isn’t much of a discussion on different
ethnic groups killing each other,” said Grubbs.
Although there hasn’t been many shootings in Kern County, in
other locations in the U.S., there have been several cases of deadly force
being used in situations where a Taser or some other type of force could have
been used.
“Often times, in some of these situations, less lethal force
is used,” said Grubbs. “It doesn’t always work for a variety of different
reasons, though. Sometimes these devices don’t work or people don’t respond to
them, and the officer is left with five seconds to make a rational decision.”
Often, media is blamed for a lot of the way people think
about law enforcement. The theory is that if it wasn’t for all the coverage of
controversial subject matter, such as unarmed shootings or racial profiling, it
is possible that this negative stigma that has been created for the police, may
not be as harsh as it is now.
“The media isn’t fully to blame. Law enforcement is somewhat
to blame. Not all shootings are 100 percent right. We aren’t doing a good job
of educating the community about how law enforcement works and how their
training goes,” said Grubbs.
“It goes back to a lack of education in civics. Our
education system has a lot to do with it. Officer shootings are almost always
preceded by a bad decision made by the person the officer is shooting at.”
Due to all the recent riots in Ferguson and Oakland, as well
as other cities and towns in the United States, some Americans believe that we
are on the brink of a civil war because more and more civilians are becoming
more combative with police officers and authority in general.
“I hope that it doesn’t happen,” said Grubbs. “I don’t see a
civil war happening, but I do see somewhat of a national kind of event
happening that will cause society to stabilize and come back to its core. And
even if that did happen, law enforcement would still be there to do their job,
regardless of what public opinion is.”
Some think the problem is within the hiring process of law
enforcement and that it breeds corruption. It could also be that along the way,
good cops become bad because of the already negative outlook on them by the
people they are sworn in to protect.
“I don’t think people come on the force with intentions of
becoming corrupt. Through the course of their careers, some officers have
become corrupt, though. In most cases they are weeded out quickly,” said
Grubbs.
“Police officers take their job very seriously, as well as
their responsibilities and role in society very seriously. If these corrupt
individuals are found, they are reprimanded or fired very quickly.”
For those who are interested in finding out statistics on
police shootings, there is no national database, so the only way to find the
information would be to search on Google for the date and location you are
inquiring about. For the numbers being as low as they supposedly are, it’s
questionable why they make the information so difficult to find.
“There should be a national database, there is a database
for California,” Grubb said. “I think that most law enforcement agencies don’t
have a problem with that. Most of our shootings are justified, so why would we
have a problem hiding that information?”
- See more at:
http://www.therip.com/news/2015/04/08/police-brutality-isnt-all-that-it-seems/#sthash.tO5olrVl.dpuf
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