ABSTRACT
The second decade of the twenty-first century has seen an emergent zeitgeist holding the police to a level of accountability and responsibility for incidents of officer wrongdoing that has been without precedent in the history of law enforcement in the United States. The police narrative of deadly force incidents and other use of force incidents, as well as other misdeeds, has been repeatedly challenged, at times disbelieved, and ultimately viewed with a certain degree of skepticism. The response of law enforcement has been, in no small part, to assume the mantra of victim in declaring that there exists a “war on cops” and a so-called “Ferguson effect”, the first of which portrays the police as having to defend themselves in a “war” and the second as a phenomenon that prevents them from “doing their jobs”. No empirical evidence exists for either portrayal or phenomenon.
