Poll: Black Americans' Confidence in Police Surges After Dipping in 2020
A new poll shows that black Americans have more confidence in law enforcement now than they did a year ago.
Amid protests and riots following the death of George Floyd last summer, a Gallup poll found that a record-low 19 percent of black Americans had “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the police.
That figure has now risen to 27 percent, according to a new poll. The poll, conducted from June 1 to July 5 among 1,381 adults, has a margin of error of +/- 3 percentage points.
Fifty-one percent of those surveyed expressed confidence in the police, up from a low of 48 percent last year.
Fifty-three percent of Americans had confidence in the police in 2019.
Confidence among white adults came in at 56 percent, unchanged from last year but still lower than in 2019.
Gallup noted that the gap between black and white Americans’ confidence in the police averaged 30 percentage points between 2014 and 2019. The difference was 29 percent in this year’s poll.
The survey also showed that 49 percent of Hispanic Americans expressed confidence in the police.
Democratic consultant George Arzt of New York City said the crime wave that followed police retrenchments has changed people’s attitudes, according to U.S. News & World Report.
“It is happening around the country and here in New York: Crime and violence have spiked. There are a lot of shootings,” he said.
“I think that suddenly the pendulum has shifted from the cries of ‘defund the police’ to ‘wait a minute — we’ve got to have more and better policing. We’ve got to have more police in the street and in the subway. We’ve got to stop this crime,'” he said.
The Gallup poll found that confidence in the police is far greater than in the criminal justice system as a whole.
Only 17 percent of white Americans and 11 percent of black Americans expressed either “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of confidence in the justice system.
In contrast, 35 percent of Hispanic Americans expressed confidence in the justice system.
Former Detroit Police Chief James Craig recently said that ill-conceived bail reform plans created a revolving door justice system.
“Bail reform is a failure,” he told Fox News in June. “We have criminals in the streets.”
Craig said a proposal by President Joe Biden to reduce crime amounts to “pandering to the progressive side of the party that really wants to defund and dismantle policing as we know it.”
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