Beyond the scenes of protest and resistance playing out in cities across the country, a movement of a different sort has taken hold. |
The American public’s views on the pervasiveness of racism have taken a hard leftward turn over the past few years. Never before in the history of modern polling have Americans expressed such widespread agreement that racial discrimination plays a role in policing — and in society at large. |
Driven by the Black Lives Matter movement, this shift has primed the country for a new groundswell — one that has quickly earned the sympathy of most Americans, polling shows. As a result, in less than two weeks, it has already forced local governments and national politicians to make tangible policy commitments. |
In a Monmouth University poll released this week, 76 percent of Americans — including 71 percent of white people — called racism and discrimination “a big problem” in the United States. That’s a 26-percentage-point spike since 2015. In the poll, 57 percent of Americans said demonstrators’ anger was fully justified, and another 21 percent called it somewhat justified. |
In the Monmouth poll, and in another released this week by CBS News, exactly 57 percent of Americans said police officers were generally more likely to treat black people unfairly than to mistreat white people. In both surveys, about half of white people said so. This was a drastic change, particularly for white Americans, who have not historically said they believed that black people continued to face pervasive discrimination. |
“There’s definitely been a seismic shift in the country,” said Steve Phillips, a civil rights lawyer and political analyst who founded the advocacy group Democracy in Color. |
He pointed to what might have sounded like a radical demand just a few years ago — cutting funding for police departments and redirecting it toward social services — and noted that it has now been openly embraced by some mayors and police chiefs, in cities including Los Angeles. “I was interested to see how that would play itself out, and now they’re doing it — it’s actually happening,” Mr. Phillips said. |
Also this week, lawmakers in Washington have pushed to end a program that sends military equipment to local police departments, and House Democrats have vowed to unveil a sweeping police-reform bill by next week. On the campaign trail, Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Tuesday said that if elected president, he would immediately set up a national police oversight commission. |
Implicit and explicit bias |
In 2009, the year President Barack Obama took office, just 36 percent of white Americans said the country needed to do more to ensure that black people gained equal rights, according to a Pew Research Center poll. By 2017, four years after the start of the Black Lives Matter movement, that number had leapt to 54 percent of white people and roughly three in five Americans over all. |
Sixty-one percent of the country in that poll said it supported Black Lives Matter. |
While polls can tell us only what people say they believe — and could therefore be affected by a respondent’s desire to sound politically correct — a 2018 study by two social psychologists determined that even people’s implicit attitudes had shifted during the Black Lives Matter movement. |
That study asked over one million digital participants to quickly associate a series of faces (some black and some white) with a series of words. The researchers found that during and after the protests, people were less likely to immediately associate black people’s images with negative words, or to quickly tie white people to positive ones. |
Anup Gampa, a social psychologist at Harvey Mudd College in California and one of the authors of the study, said the shift in attitudes had occurred among people of all ages, and among conservatives as well as liberals. “Based on our findings, I wouldn’t be surprised if these protests have moved even white conservative attitudes to be more pro-black or anti-racist,” he said in an interview, referring to the recent demonstrations. |
Mr. Phillips said the shift in attitudes spearheaded by the Black Lives Matter movement had extended even to the way protesters were operating. |
“Much of the road map for how to engage on these issues has been put forward, and so when this happened there was more clarity, I think, around how to respond,” he said. “At some of these protests, they’ve had the white people form the outer ring. So there’s an awareness there that hasn’t been.” |
In this week’s Monmouth poll, most Americans continued to express at least some level of satisfaction with their local police departments. Still, the poll reflected a new willingness — across generations — to say that the police tend to show racial bias. |
A similar trend has occurred over the past few years with regard to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency responsible for enforcing the country’s immigration laws. It has become the least popular federal agency, according to data from the Pew Research Center. |
In a March poll, Americans were just as likely to disapprove of the agency as they were to approve. Of the other nine agencies Pew asked about, none had less than 60 percent approval. |
Long before he declared himself “your law and order president” this week, essentially positioning himself against the protesters, President Trump had put support for law enforcement at the center of his political identity. In the process, he has often singled out ICE for praise. |
In this case, as in so many others, Mr. Trump’s combative brand of politics tends to draw clear dividing lines: Whether you support him will usually coincide fairly cleanly with your stance on any number of issues. Yet throughout his presidency, he has commanded a minority coalition. That’s certainly true now, with his approval rating stuck in the low 40s. |
As he embraces harsh tactics against protesters, and seeks to label many of those fighting for racial justice as “domestic terrorists,” he has helped force a commitment one way or the other. And for the moment, a large and growing majority appears to be choosing the other side. |
The Public Religion Research Institute was in the midst of a nationwide poll last week when the first protests broke out over George Floyd’s killing. The group’s researchers found that as demonstrations ramped up, Mr. Trump’s favorability rating fell significantly among certain key voting groups. |
In the first three days of the poll, May 26 to 28, 40 percent of political independents expressed a positive view of the president; in interviews conducted over the three days that followed — starting on May 29, when Mr. Trump tweeted, “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” — his approval among independents dropped to 30 percent. Among white Christians, the dip was 11 points. Among seniors, his rating fell especially hard: from 58 percent to 41 percent. |
Meanwhile, in Michigan, the Legislature is pushing toward more police training. |
As demonstrations over George Floyd’s killing and clashes between the police and protesters continued to roil the nation, the Michigan Legislature put a bill that would require more police training on a fast track toward passage. |
The State Senate unanimously passed legislation on Thursday that would require police officers to be trained in implicit bias, violence de-escalation and how to identify and interact with people who have mental health issues. |
“When police officers get trained, they drill them on tactics and firearms and car chases,” said State Senator Jeff Irwin, a Democrat from Ann Arbor who sponsored the bill. “They really beat it into them, the us-versus-them mentality. But they don’t train them specifically on mental health illnesses, even though one-third of the people in our jails have mental health issues. They don’t train them on implicit bias, which we all have, and we know that affects discretion. And they don’t train them on de-escalation and how to negotiate situations down.” |
State Senator Stephanie Chang, a Democrat from Detroit, wondered through tears what her 1-year-old daughter would encounter when she grows up. |
“Will black boys be seen as a threat when they become young black men, simply because of their race?” she said. “Will my black and Asian daughters feel a sense of safety or fear when they encounter a police officer?” |
Both the Michigan Sheriffs’ Association and the Michigan Association of Chiefs of Police opposed the bill, saying that law enforcement professionals, not the state, should dictate training standards. |
The legislation now moves to the House, with a hearing expected next week. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer endorsed the bill on Wednesday and said the police should also be required to intervene when they witness other officers’ misconduct. |
State Representative Graham Filler, a Republican from the Mid-Michigan region who leads the House Judiciary Committee, said he expected the bill to draw widespread support, because “everyone realizes the importance of training for law enforcement officers.” |
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