Study shows deep racial division when it comes to attitudes about cops — but it’s driven by experience

WashPost

The Cato Institute recently published the results of a survey of 2,000 people about their attitudes toward policing. The results are pretty striking.

First, 68 percent of white people had a favorable view of police, against just 40 percent of blacks and 59 percent of Hispanics. Blacks (73 percent) were much more likely to say that police are too quick to use lethal force than whites (35 percent) and Hispanics (54 percent). A healthy majority of whites (64 percent) say their local police department treats people of different races equally; only a minority of blacks (31 percent) and Hispanics (42 percent) think so. Among all three groups, only a majority of white people believe that cops are usually held accountable for misconduct.

There’s a common perception among some on the right that attitudes toward police are more affected by class than race. This survey suggests otherwise. While it’s true that upper-income whites generally have more favorable attitudes toward law enforcement than lower-income whites, among blacks opinions generally remain the same among all income groups. Another interesting statistic: While 85 percent of Republicans believe police only use lethal force when necessary, just 36 percent of black Republicans do.

Those latter figures suggest that attitudes toward police aren’t born of ideology so much as of actual experience. More figures from the survey back this up. The study found, for example, that blacks were twice as likely as whites to report that the police had directed profanity at them. Blacks were twice as likely to report knowing someone who was abused by cops. And upper-income black Americans reported getting stopped by police more frequently than lower-income whites. Overall, blacks were five times more likely than whites to report experiencing some sort of mistreatment at the hands of police. As the study’s author Emily Ekins writes, “abuse at the hands of an individual police officer — whether individually or vicariously experienced — may be internalized and help explain differences in favorability toward the police.”

The only real conclusion to draw: Black people are more mistrustful of police not because black people are more likely to commit crimes, or because black people are less interested in law and order, or because of some other cultural issue, but because, quite simply, black people are much more likely to have been victimized by the police — and they’re much more likely to know others like them who have been victimized as well. [MORE]