an individual’s feelings and thoughts towards police. Because our survey participants were mainly African-American or Caucasian, we hypothesized that African-Americans would have a more negative view about the police more than Caucasians. Race is a big issue for a lot of people when it comes to the criminal justice system. People believe that the treatment you receive from police officers does have to do with an individual’s race. Our data does support this hypothesis by an independent samples t-test.

Table 1. Views of Police by Variable

*. Significant at the .05 level

One hypothesis in regards if the type of information like positive news stories, negative news stories or both, would affect an individual's thoughts on police. We hypothesized that if negative news stories were more likely to catch an individual's attention, they would have a more negative perception of the police because negativity is all that individual saw. However, this hypothesis was not supported by the data. We then conducted a series of bivariate correlations to investigate relationships between the participants' use of social media and news programs and the average of the scores. The hypothesis of if the number of social media sources a person uses where police are portrayed negatively, they would have a negative opinion was not supported by the data, p=.735, ns. Along these lines, we hypothesized that how credible people think these sources does affect how they feel about the police but this was not supported by the data, p=.755, ns. We also hypothesized that the number of links a person was exposed to outside information about the police does affect how people view the police because not every source has the same story or point of view but this hypothesis was not supported by the data, p=.505, ns. We hypothesized that the older an individual was they would stand by police and have a more positive outlook on them versus someone who is younger and would have a more negative view.