Poll shows sweeping change in U.S. views of police violence
DETROIT — A dramatic shift has taken place in the nation’s opinions on policing and race, as a new poll finds that more Americans today than five years ago believe police brutality is a very serious problem that too often goes undisciplined and unequally targets black Americans.
The new findings from The Associated PressNORC Center for Public Affairs Research suggest the death of George Floyd and the weeks of nationwide and global protests that followed have changed perceptions in ways that previous incidents of police brutality did not.
About half of American adults now say police violence against the public is a “very” or “extremely” serious problem, up from about a third as recently as September last year. Only about 3 in 10 said the same in July 2015, just a few months after Freddie Gray, a black man, died in police custody in Baltimore.
In the latest poll, roughly 3 in 10 said police violence is a moderately serious problem. Those who say it is not a serious problem has declined from a third in 2015 to about 2 in 10 today.
Floyd, a black man, died in late May after a police officer in Minneapolis pressed his knee into Floyd’s neck for several minutes. Experts say the dramatic change in opinion about police violence that has followed is an indication the country is grappling with how to confront centuries of structural racism and inequity.
“I have long argued that we cannot have a racial reconciliation in the United States because there’s not been an admission of what has gone on,” said Wornie Reed, director of the Race and Social Policy Research Center at Virginia Tech. “The nation is constructed on [racism}. … It’s not an accident or something that America decided to do on the way to its greatness. It’s the means by which it became great.”
The new AP-NORC poll finds that more Americans now think police in most communities are more likely to use deadly force against a black person than a white person, 61%, up from 49% in July 2015. Only about a third say the race of a person does not make a difference in the use of deadly force against them, compared with roughly half in 2015.
And Americans are far more likely now than they were five years ago to say that police officers who cause injury or death in the course of their job are treated too leniently by the justice system, 65% vs. 41%, rather than too harshly or fairly. Fewer now think they’re treated either fairly or too harshly.
Changes in opinions about social issues are more often slow and incremental, said Jennifer Benz, the deputy director of the AP-NORC Center. Benz said such significant changes can often indicate meaningful or lasting change has taken place in public awareness and attitudes.