For most people the only personal experiences they have with police are in situations such as traffic stops or crowd control at sports contests. The major benefit of community-oriented policing, school resource officers, and programs such as DARE may be that these programs offer people positive experiences with police officers. This may in turn change attitudes toward law enforcement. Most citizens have no experience at all with transnational crime, though some may have been willing consumers of illegal products such as drugs or imported bootlegged CDs. The traditional answer given by sociologists is that reality is produced as a by product of the socialization process.
Individuals interact with others and internalize their experiences and conversations.
As children, we come to understand the world around us because it is mediated for us by parents, teachers, siblings and peers. As we grow older we continue to rely on personal experiences and the experiences of others. The experiences of others and their retelling can be important in shaping a person's view of reality, and in some cases the reality shared by any entire community. When black celebrities like Joe Morgan , ex-baseball player, or Blair Underwood, actor on L.A. Law, discussed for the national media how they were stopped while driving expensive cars in upper middle class neighborhoods, a logical conclusion was that minorities continue to harassed by the police needlessly. While a number of police department spokespersons appeared in the media to claim that Furman was an aberration among police officers, most minority members continued to think otherwise.