A moral middle on policing
Americans are still talking past one another on race, criminal justice and policing, making the same circular arguments we’ve made for more than half a century. On the key question of whether blacks get fair and equal treatment from police, polls indicate that most whites believe that justice is being delivered about as fairly as it should be, while their black neighbors say there is a bias at play in many departments that works to the disadvantage of AfricanAmericans.
That’s a formula for conflict and confusion, and for the frustrations that led to the launch and continued potency of the Black Lives Matter movement.
But here’s the good news: Even though blacks and whites see the criminal justice system differently, we actually agree on specific reforms. That creates a political sweet spot, a zone I call the Moral Middle, where conservatives and progressives, Democrats, Republicans, independents and libertarians can find broad agreement.
It represents an opportunity that we must not squander.
Polling organizations have been asking Americans what they think about race and crime for generations, and a close look at the results reveals some important patterns.
In general, whites recognize a degree of bias against blacks when it comes to policing but see law enforcement as mostly fair. Blacks, not surprisingly, have a much higher degree of suspicion about police and policing.
In December 2014, an ABC/Washington Post poll taken about four months after the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., asked the question, “Do you think blacks and other minorities receive equal treatment as whites in the criminal justice system or not?”
Only 44% of whites said minorities didn’t get fair treatment; most thought the criminal justice system treats all races equally. But an overwhelming 89% of blacks thought minorities don’t get fair treatment.
A poll by the Gallup Organization took the average of responses from four years and found that 59% of whites have “a great deal or quite a lot of confidence” in the police, compared with only 37% of blacks. Gallup notes that “this racial gap in confidence in the police has been evident in the data throughout the past decade and a half that Gallup has been measuring these trends on an annual basis.”
But hidden within the bleak portrait is this more hopeful fact: Many Americans, white, black and brown, recognize that American cops need an upgrade. The ABC News/Washington Post poll found that an overwhelming 86% of Americans favor having cops wear small video cameras whenever they’re on duty. And 87% support having an outside prosecutor who does not work with police on a regular basis investigate situations when police kill an unarmed civilian.
A CBS News poll found 59% of whites and 85% of blacks agreed with the statement that “most police officers need better training on how to handle confrontations with civilians.” That poll found that 91% of respondents supported having officers wear cameras while on duty, and 49% wanted to have an outside prosecutor handle cases involving a civilian death at the hands of police.
Crunch more numbers, and it turns out that solid majorities of whites and blacks agree on a cluster of additional reform measures. Americans think local police departments should reflect the racial makeup of the communities they patrol, and should end the use of military weapons like assault rifles and armored vehicles (or leave them in the hands of other agencies like the National Guard).
“Whites and blacks have different views of the current state of policing in the U.S., and this racial divide is deep and longstanding,” a spokeswoman for the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research recently wrote. “But those eager for reform can find some reasons for optimism in the similarity between blacks and whites in views on policies, and the desire of the black community to improve public safety in their communities with more, not fewer, police officers.”
Implementing those five measures — more training, wide use of body cameras, appointment of outside prosecutors in cases of civilian deaths, racial diversity on local police forces and banning military equipment — would improve police-community relations almost immediately, and allow political leaders to build coalitions to make more reforms possible.
What are we waiting for?