Here are America’s worst police departments

According to a social study, almost nearly half of American’s dislike their police department.

In the new study, a little over 47 percent of Americans gave their police precinct a poor grade of D or F.

The states of Idaho, Arkansas, Missouri, Virginia and Georgia are among those ranked highest in the number of people reporting negative perceptions of police.

Photo Credit: drugabuse.com

The results were gathered from a social media study by drug treatment and awareness site drugabuse.com.

The study found that more than 37 percent of Americans gave their police department an F grade, with the national average being a D.

Grades of A came from North Dakota, West Virginia, New Hampshire, Kansas and Hawaii.

Slightly more than 13 percent of states offered a C grade to police departments, including Texas, despite the fact that three Texas cities—San Antonio, Austin and Fort Worth—when looking at data city by city, gave their police department an F grade.

The cities of Boston, San Francisco and Chicago were in the middle with C grades.

The company analyzed over 766,000 tweets about people’s sentiments toward law enforcement in each state.

The state with the most positive perception of police was New Hampshire.

The most negative was Arkansas. The city with the most positive perception of police was Columbus, Ohio, while the one with the most negative was, not surprisingly, Ferguson, Mo.

Other “failing” city police departments with poor ratings included Los Angeles, Miami, Phoenix, New York and Denver.

The reasons for such low scores vary, according to Philip Leaf, a Johns Hopkins University professor whose work is concentrated around preventing youth violence, the overuse of incarceration, trauma, post-traumatic stress disorder and violence in communities.

“If you talk to young people in Baltimore, I don’t think their feelings about police have changed at all in the last five to seven years,” says Leaf. “There has been a negative perception of police in many communities for a long time. There just haven’t been conversations with these young people or in the media about it until recently. There hasn’t been an upsurge of disconnect with the police. With cellphones, there has been documentation of things that people have been talking about for a long time. People haven’t been believed, and now it’s hard not to believe it, if you see it on TV.”

And you know what I say? If you would’ve asked this before the existence of social media, the answer would probably be the same.

The grades would be just as low. The problem is, policing has always been an issue, especially in Black communities.

Since the emergence of social media and the use of mobile and digital technology, we are finally seeing problems that were constantly swept under the rug.

Nonetheless, social media has certainly started a new conversation on policing within our communities.

This study shows America’s policing has a lot of work to do.