Law and Order in Philadelphia

“Law and Order in Philadelphia” is a documentary based on the policing. We see that the area is bad and that there is violence, crime, and drugs on the streets. There is a lot of crime in Philadelphia and they use the due process model which “stresses the criminal justice system to protect suspects from honest mistakes or deliberate deception and bias by police…”(Barkan 400). A reporter goes undercover with the police so see the everyday occurrences with crime in Philadelphia. We witnessed in the video that some police officers go undercover to befriend criminals on the streets. They build relationships with them so instead of just arresting them they can actually talk to them and help them out. Some police officers won’t wear their uniforms and will go undercover because when they do people often give them disrespect when they are in uniform. If they see them in regular clothing as them on the streets then they will respect them more. They feel this way because they don’t have that power over them and that they are just talking to them as friends. We saw in the beginning of the video that a man with a gun was being chased down by police in uniform and that he did not give them any respect at all. We saw another woman who was on the streets that does twenty five bags of heroin a day but still talked to the police about her drug addiction because they weren’t in uniform. They told her that she would not be getting arrested if she released any information and she trusted them enough to tell them.
Jerome Skolnick’s working personality theory states that “…the work people do affects the way they view the world and even their personalities” (403). The working personality of a police officer comes from the dangerousness of their job which “makes police suspicious of and even hostile toward the public and reinforces police solidarity, or mutual loyalty” (403). What causes police to act this way is that it creates a mentality in which prompts them to be ready and willing