Social Media's Influence In The Criminal Justice System

Words: 1596
Pages: 7

As technological advances continue to be made, so does the electronic platforms that social media uses. When these platforms evolve they also become easier to use and access, and as a result social media finds it easier to become more involved with our daily lives. For example, Facebook is one of these social medias that many people are able to use with ease. However, this also means that many people are exposed to whatever shows up on their news feed. Besides the massive increase in Shooting Stars memes, a noticeable increase in sousveillance videos has been showing up the on news feed of Facebook users recently. These sousveillance videos tend to capture the violent police misconduct usually performed in the United States and may result in …show more content…
(para. 63)
Based off of the analysis of the trends and data found in Roberts’ study, it has established that there is a low confidence among Canadians towards our criminal justice system and the influence of social media is at the source of its causes. When Roberts (2004) questioned the Canadians again about which specific branch of the CJS that they were most confident in using the same scale, 83% of them answered that they were most confident in police institutions (para. 54). Although a fair proportion of Canadians have low confidence in their CJS, the lack of confidence is actually directed to court related processes such as the parole system. The police, however, have been placed under scrutiny by the public in the past several years after having many instances of police misconduct have been caught on cell phone footage taken by nearby civilians. Because a majority of the public do not interact with the police often, it came as a surprise to many that there were police officers using unnecessary or even lethal force to unarmed individuals. Make no mistake, these misconducts have been occurring ever since policing was invented; the majority of the public were just unaware and only now are they able to see it now due to the accessibility of video recording devices and the social media platforms that presents us with these videos. Despite the violent video footages of police brutality or the countless news articles on how another mentally disabled person was shot and killed by a police officer, how does the majority of Canadians still have confidence in the police? Roberts (2004) would simply