Tamara Humphrey, Junior, Spencer County High School, Kentucky Dr. Mara Merlino, Associate Professor, Psychology and Sociology
The Voices Project was a survey conducted to measure public perception of police. After seeing the results of the survey, we wanted to know if public perception of police matched individual experiences with police. Previous studies, like George Gerbner's Cultivation Theory (Gerbner, 1970), have shown that negative media portrayed in social media does in fact affect the public's perception of police in a negative way. This study was important because public perception of police affects how the criminal justice system works. In this paper, our hypotheses regarding certain factors, like an individual's demographics, relationships with police, or their exposure to the criminal justice system and their effect on perception of the police, will be discussed.
The survey for this project was created using Survey Monkey, and was deployed to the public through Facebook and Twitter. We constructed a total of 56 questions, consisting of both open-ended and multiple choice questions to determine an individual's perception of the police and their demographic information. Some of the questions participants were asked were: What is your sex? What is your political orientation (using