Article from For Liberty by Norm Leahy.
A Gallup survey of attitudes toward police finds 61 percent of Black respondents want law enforcement to spend the same amount of time in their community as they do now. Twenty percent want an even bigger law enforcement presence.
While this may be a blow to those who want to abolish or otherwise defund police departments (abolition registers just 15 percent support, according to an earlier Gallup poll), other parts of the survey show there are still wide disparities about the treatment people think they receive from police:
Fewer than one in five Black Americans feel very confident that the police in their area would treat them with courtesy and respect. While similar to the 24% of Asian Americans saying the same, it is markedly lower than the 40% of Hispanic Americans and the 56% of White Americans who feel this way. This could either stem from Black Americans’ own negative experiences with the police or from their familiarity with people who have had negative encounters with law enforcement.
When factoring in those who are at least somewhat confident that the police would treat them well, a majority of Black Americans (61%) are generally confident, but this is still below the 85% seen nationally, including 91% of White Americans.
Rather than abolish police or slashing their budgets, Gallup found “upward of 90% favoring specific reforms aimed at improving police relations with the communities they serve and preventing or punishing abusive police behavior.”
Image Credit: By Joi Ito (Flickr: NYPD Drills) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
wpDiscuz
Yes, they are black; but not totally stupid
They need to get back to walking the beat and be seen as people not overbearing authority figures. Be a part of the community and get to actually know the people. Stop riding around in cars all the time.
‘Walking a beat’ to better protect the constituency is not really practical in most locals, I blame Black parents that never explain to their children that cops/law-enforcement is necessary part of the fabric of American society and are due respect for their for the ‘first-responder’ jobs they do. Without police, this society would become a very savage situation where ‘The Strong will rule’. Thank god for the 2nd Amendment.
‘Walking a beat’ to better protect the constituency is not really practical in most locals, I blame Black parents that never explain to their children that cops/law-enforcement is necessary part of the fabric of American society and are due respect for their for the ‘first-responder’ jobs they do. Without police, this society would become a very savage situation where ‘The Strong will rule’. Thank god for the 2nd Amendment.