Addressing Police Brutality at Sonoma State University

With our finding we discovered that police brutality is not seen at Sonoma State University.

In our research project, I personally found in my interview process that police brutality is not seen at Sonoma State. I interviewed three people, two females and one male, only one of them had a positive experience with the police and the other two had neutral experiences involving police officers.

The negative experiences had to deal with police officers either giving them a ticket or having a bad attitude once they had pulled them over. The positive experience that the female had dealt with was a police officer showing up at her house because of a noise complaint, but he handled the situation very professionally and had a good attitude toward what was happening.

Since there was no physical contact I would determine that police brutality is not seen. It just seems that police at Sonoma state and around the Sonoma County seem to have a bad attitude when dealing with students that they pull over and/or hand out a ticket to.

This story is about my personal opinion on what I thought about our research project that occurred at Sonoma State. Our research was on if Police Brutality towards Students at Sonoma State

Aiham Abdallah

Op-ed

For our investigative sociology class, we were supposed to conduct a research on a social issue. Our group decided to do our research project on If Police Brutality exists in Sonoma County towards Sonoma State college students. In our research project, I personally found that Police Brutality may exist, but is not really seen at Sonoma State. We conducted over 100 surveys where we noticed that the majority were positive. I interviewed two males, one had a negative experience while the other had a positive experience. The negative experience had to do with a student during his freshman year on campus. His experience was negative because the police officer could have handled the experience better in a sense that the student didn’t do anything wrong to get his personal belongings in his dorm searched although he did have illegal paraphernalia. The positive experience had to do with a student who was stopped by Rohnert Park police, but let him go with a warning and instead of a citation for not having his seat belt on. The police officer let him go with a warning because he noticed that he attended Sonoma State. Since there was no excessive force or any physical contact I would determine that police brutality is not seen in our study with college students.

This oped is regarding my personal take on our group project regarding police brutality on Sonoma State University and the relationship between college students and the police.

For our Investigative class, we were instructed to research a social issue and expose that issue. My group chose to investigate the issue regarding police brutality, however more specifically police and Sonoma State students relationships. We wanted to see if college students have more of a negative or positive outlook on the police in our community. For the whole research process and project, as a group we conducted surveys on the Sonoma State University campus, gathering 111 surveys. Survey responders varied in age, gender, ethnicity, and experience with the local police. My part in of the project was to collect all of the surveys from my group, and create bar graphs to show our results. We found that we had more female responders than male, and the most prominent ethnicity was Caucasian and Latino/a. It was fascinating to see what students felt about the local police. We included a question that asked if they had a positive or negative experience and we found that the majority of our respondents had a positive encounter. Another question after that was if they would call the police if necessary, and for the majority respondents answered yes. I found this interesting because if they answered that they had a negative experience they still answered yes to calling the police if necessary. Another part of the project I am in control and in charge of is the abstract, that we truthfully wrote before the actual research was conducted, however looking at the abstract now, it still fits what our aim was. The last part of the paper I was responsible for was the keywords for our research, in order for others to easily find similar topics for their future research. Along this whole process, I take it upon myself to go through other parts of the paper, ones not my responsibility, and add suggestions respectively and help out where I can.

This article contains my thoughts on what I found in our research on Police Brutality and if seen from the Sonoma State community. Our group did surveys and interviewed students to learn there experiences on police in the area.

Op-ed

For our investigative sociology class, we were supposed to conduct a research on a social issue. Our group decided to do our research project on If Police Brutality exists in Sonoma County towards Sonoma State college students. In our research project, I personally found that Police Brutality may exist, but is not really seen at Sonoma State. We conducted over 100 surveys where we noticed that the majority were positive. I interviewed two males, one had a negative experience while the other had a positive experience. The negative experience had to do with a student during his freshman year on campus. His experience was negative because the police officer could have handled the experience better in a sense that the student didn’t do anything wrong to get his personal belongings in his dorm searched although he did have illegal paraphernalia. The positive experience had to do with a student who was stopped by Rohnert Park police, but let him go with a warning and instead of a citation for not having his seat belt on. The police officer let him go with a warning because he noticed that he attended Sonoma State. Since there was no excessive force or any physical contact I would determine that police brutality is not seen in our study with college students.