African American Attitudes About The Police Over Time

In 1973, the Gallup Organization began asking Americans about their confidence in a group of key central institutions. Starting in 1983, with one exception (1992), the question has been asked every year. In their latest survey from 2019, 53% said they had a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in the police. In its write-up on the results, Gallup wrote “Just three institutions – the military (73%), small business (68%), and the police (53%) have garnered majority levels of confidence in all polls Gallup has conducted on each measure over the past two decades.” In the same battery of questions however, only 24% in 2019 had high confidence in the criminal justice system. There are significant differences between blacks and whites on these questions.

In response to George Floyd’s tragic death at the hands of a police officer, pollsters are once again measuring the public’s reaction. Their work builds on a considerable collection of surveys that show African Americans have long felt that they are treated differently from whites by the police. In the February 2015 issue of AEI’s Political Report, we documented that history. 

Roughly 50 years ago, in a 1969 question asked by Louis Harris, 76% of blacks said blacks face discrimination in the way they are treated by the police, while 19% of whites gave that response. When the question was asked almost forty years later in 2008, there was still a substantial difference – the black response had risen to 89%, but for the first time a majority of whites (54%) agreed. The last time Harris asked the question in 2014, the response was 86% for blacks and 48% for whites.

In 1995 and again in 2014, NBC News and the Wall Street Journal asked questions that reveal the deep suspicion among African Americans about the police. Only 32% of blacks in 1995 and 28% in 2014 said they had confidence that their local police treated blacks and whites equally. Thirty-four percent of blacks in 1995 and 40% in 2014 said they had confidence in them to not use excessive force on suspects (the questions in 2014 were asked of registered voters).

Pollsters responded to the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and Eric Garner in New York City with many questions that confirmed these long-held views of African Americans. In a late 2014-early 2015 Ipsos/Reuters poll, 30% of blacks said they trusted police officers to be fair and just. Seventy percent of African Americans in the poll said the police unfairly target minorities and 76% that it was understandable that some teenage boys and young men are wary of police officers. In an ABC News/Washington Post survey from December 2014, 74% of blacks said the recent killings of unarmed African American men by police in Ferguson, Missouri and New York City were a sign of broader problems in the treatment of African Americans by police; only 18% felt they were isolated incidents. Eighty-five percent of blacks in a December 2014 CBS poll said that police officers needed better training on how to handle confrontations with civilians, and 92% in an ABC News/Washington Post question said that they would support a policy that when police kill an unarmed civilian it should be investigated by an outside prosecutor. In 2014, 52% of blacks in a CBS News question said the police in their communities made them feel mostly safe, but a substantial 43% said mostly anxious. In an early 2020 Washington Post/Ipsos online survey, just 28% of blacks trusted the police to treat all races equally. In a 2019 Pew survey on racial progress, 44% of blacks said they had been unfairly stopped by the police; fewer than two in ten whites, Hispanics or Asians gave that response.

The picture is not entirely negative. Gallup has asked about respect for the police in your area in nine separate surveys since 1965. The last time they asked the question in 2016, after a series of incidents involving the police, 67% of nonwhites said they had a great deal of respect for their local police. Seventy-two percent of blacks in a December 2014 Harris poll agreed that most police officers have a positive impact on the community where they work. A majority of blacks (61%) said they had confidence in the police in their communities to protect them from violent crime. In the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll cited above, 58% of blacks, up from 49% in 1995, said police officers in their community did a good job of enforcing the law.

While the polls reveal a complicated picture of black and white attitudes, there is undeniable long-standing and pervasive pessimism among them about the police and the criminal justice system.