Confidence in police falls to record low, poll finds

Amid waves of civil unrest as protesters across the country continue to demonstrate against police brutality, Americans’ confidence in the police has dropped to a record low, according to a Gallup poll released Wednesday.

The survey, conducted by Gallup from early June to midJuly, found that confidence in the police had fallen 5 points, to 48%, from the year before. Gallup, which started tracking the public’s confidence in a range of public institutions in 1973 during the Watergate scandal, adding the police in 1993, said this was the “first time in the 27year trend that this reading is below the majority.”

But despite the overall decline, the survey found that Republicans’ confidence in the police had risen 7 points, to 82%. Democrats’ faith in law enforcement dropped 6 points, to 28%.

Gallup conducted telephone interviews with a random sample of 1,226 adults for the poll. The margin of sampling error for a sample of this size is plus or minus 4 percentage points, according to Gallup.

The drop in confidence came after George Floyd, a Black man, was killed in Minneapolis police custody at the end of May, inspiring weeks of civil unrest nationwide. Floyd’s last words, “I can’t breathe,” echoed those of Eric Garner, a Black man who died after being put in a choke hold by a police officer on Staten Island in 2014.

Black people are far more likely than whites and other groups to be the victims of use of force by the police, even when racial disparities in crime are taken into account. A New York Times report found that at least 70 people over the past decade, ranging in age from 19 to 65, had died in law enforcement custody after saying the same words: “I can’t breathe.” A majority of them had been stopped or held over nonviolent infractions, 911 calls about suspicious behavior, or concerns about their mental health. More than half were Black.

The Gallup survey also found that the gap between white and Black Americans’ expressed confidence in the police has never been greater, said Mohamed Younis, Gallup’s editorinchief.

The survey found that 56% of white adults said they were confident in the police, whereas only 19% of Black adults said the same.

Nathan Howard / Associated Press A police officer shoves a protester Saturday in Portland, Ore., where Black Lives Matter demonstrations have gone on every night for weeks.