Name: How Views On Black Lives Matter Have Changed — And Why That Makes Police Reform So Hard
Brand: fivethirtyeight.com
SKU: fivethirtyeight-com-144
Availability: OnlineOnly

critic

How Views On Black Lives Matter Have Changed — And Why That Makes Police Reform So Hard

preview

Daunte Wright was driving in his car through Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, two days ago when police officers . This isn’t the first time cops against a Black person. In fact, just 10 miles away from where Wright died, former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was on trial for murder after kneeling on George Floyd’s neck last summer.Floyd’s death sparked a and a . And while it’s possible that in the wake of the latest tragedy, public support for reforming policing might increase again, new calls for change face a significant obstacle in public opinion. Gains in support for reform, especially among white Americans, tend to be fleeting, and there’s no consensus on what type of reforms the public wants.Eleven months after Floyd’s death, support for the Black Lives Matter movement has fallen, while America’s trust in law enforcement has risen. Sixty-nine percent of Americans, according to a , now trust local police and law enforcement to promote justice and equal treatment of all races versus 56 percent who felt the same way last June.  Meanwhile, in the almost four years has been asking about support for the Black Lives Matter movement, of white people have never supported the movement. Support peaked at 43 percent last June, just . Since then, white Americans’ support for the movement has dipped back down to roughly where it was before Floyd’s death and is currently at 37 percent. Some of the biggest drops in support among white Americans occurred among older people (between the ages of 50 and 64), Republicans and men. Black Americans, meanwhile, have remained steady in their support of the movement. Overall, 85 percent of Black Americans say they support Black Lives Matter, compared to 88 percent last year. And that cuts across age, education and gender.The reasons for the decline in support among white Americans are myriad. Some experts have chalked it up to and less media coverage of , making it easier for white people to . It’s also worth noting, of course, that many protests for Black and civil rights , and people’s perception of the current movement might change over time; have , for instance. (Public opinion tends to ebb and flow with tragedy, too, in recent years with the .)It’s a stark reminder, though, that in its first three weeks, its outcome is anything but certain. As we’ve written before, it’s uncommon for police officers to While a majority of Americans (57 percent) think Chauvin should be found guilty, according to a recent , 56 percent of registered voters told in a separate poll that they’re not following the trial closely. Twenty-one percent said it was because they didn’t think anything will change.But even if Chauvin is convicted, it’s unlikely policing will fundamentally change in the U.S. Not only is public opinion variable, leading lawmakers to back off reform, law enforcement is often reluctant to admit wrongdoing toward Black people.Police officers that they treat people of color differently based on race despite available , and evidence showing the opposite, as my colleague Perry Bacon Jr. reported last year. While we don’t have a ton of data on the political views of police officers, a 2016 survey from the of 8,000 police officers nationwide found that 67 percent believed the deaths of Black people during police encounters were isolated incidents, compared with only 31 percent who saw it as signs of a broader problem. This was the exact opposite of how the general public felt: Thirty-nine percent of U.S. adults said they thought the killings were isolated incidents versus 60 percent who felt it was indicative of a broader problem. And Black Americans were even more likely than white Americans to say police killings were a sign of a broader problem, 79 percent to 54 percent. An found last year that nearly half of Black Americans — 48 percent — have very little to no confidence at all that local police treat Black and white people the same; just 12 percent of white Americans had the same view. The pressure on local lawmakers to enact lasting change is fleeting, and current events. Even at the height of calls for police reform, getting bills turned into laws takes time, said , a sociology professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, who . Ray told me there was an uptick in calls for police-related reforms at both the local, state and federal levels after Floyd’s death since the Black Lives Matter movement . “[Black Lives Matter] wasn’t a global movement in 2014,” he said, was fatally shot by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. “People have become more aware of what’s happening. … The movement for Black lives and the attention to mistreatment by police has led to this moment.”But even with more protesters calling for changes in policing, cities’ and states’ proposals will not automatically get passed. While some places, like and , were successful in reallocating money away from police departments, others have struggled. In Minneapolis, where Floyd died, promises to “end policing as we know it” in late . And in New York City, who once advocated for defunding the New York Police Department have already begun to from the proposal during the competitive race. “The fear of ‘defunding’ messages, lack of understanding or awareness around them and lack of political and community will to change the status quo have certainly caused a considerable amount of retrenchment from those ideas,” said , a professor of behavioral science and health education at Saint Louis University. As we get further from last year, he added, cities may be more inclined to either pause reform efforts or back away from them completely. Another part of the reason police reform is so tricky to navigate is because public opinion . Just over half of Americans, according to , oppose redirecting police funds to social services (57 percent) while 43 percent supported the idea — a slight decline from last August. The only thing most people can seem to agree on — even at the height of the protests after Floyd’s death —  of defunding the police. And , even among Black Americans and Democrats. Because many Americans are so split on what they want, police reform is often politicized — leading many Democrats to tread cautiously about saying they support “defunding the police.” President Biden, for instance, to say he was in favor of a law enforcement overhaul and maintained that (Of course, these more measured stances since voters didn’t appear to link his views to the Black Lives Matter movement, which was already seeing decreased support at the time of the election.) But even with a Democratic majority in both congressional chambers, Biden hasn’t changed his messaging. He’s encouraged congressional Democrats to pass a , which would ban chokeholds and create national standards for policing to bolster accountability, but he hasn’t broached that the progressive wing of the Democratic Party . Some Republican leaders, meanwhile, have encouraged their party on reform issues, though their voters appear in policing. The Democrat-led police reform bill has , but Sen. Tim Scott, the , also introduced a police reform bill Democrats largely rebuffed that bill because they don’t think it goes far enough, but the lack of compromise among lawmakers isn’t necessarily due to the contents of the two bills (Scott with his bill and what Democrats want, ). Rather, the Black Lives Matter movement has increasingly become a partisan issue as the movement has and . That said, Americans — both Democrats and Republicans — want some sort of reform. A poll released last week from found that nearly three-fourths of Americans (71 percent) either support or strongly support a federal ban on police chokeholds. Seventy-one percent of respondents also want to end police racial profiling, while 84 percent are in favor of mandating body camera use. (Republicans were less likely than Democrats to support , but they supported mandating body cameras at nearly the same rate as Democratic respondents, 80 percent and 88 percent, respectively.)At this point, it’s unclear what’s next in both the Chauvin murder trial () and what will happen to the officer who shot and killed Wright, but what happens next is likely to have an impact on both policing and reform in years to come.CORRECTION (April 14, 2021, 10:50 a.m.): This article previously stated that 45 percent of respondents to a Morning Consult poll said they were not following the Derek Chauvin murder trial more closely because they didn’t think anything would change. In fact, it was 21 percent of registered voters.Alex Samuels is a politics reporter at FiveThirtyEight.Filed underYou are now subscribed!Sign me up

Daunte Wright was driving in his car through Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, two days ago when police officers . This isn’t the first time cops against a Black person. In fact, just 10 miles away from where Wright died, former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was on trial for murder after kneeling on George Floyd’s neck last summer.Floyd’s death sparked a and a . And while it’s possible that in the wake of the latest tragedy, public support for reforming policing might increase again, new calls for change face a significant obstacle in public opinion. Gains in support for reform,...

public

Politics reporter @FiveThirtyEight. Formerly @TexasTribune. @UTAustin and @NatPress alum. Bostonian. Talk to me: alex.l.samuels@abc.com

How Views On Black Lives Matter Have Changed — And Why That Makes Police Reform So Hard

No article scores yet.

CRITIC REVIEWS

PUBLIC REVIEWS