Most Americans support protests, agree on discrimination in policing
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 an increase of 26 percentage points 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,” Phillips said.
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 3 in 5 Americans overall.
Sixty-one percent of the country in that poll said it supported Black Lives Matter.
The current round of protests is youth-led, and so too, to some degree, is the shift in nationwide sentiment. Millennials and members of Generation Z are far more likely to say they believe police are prone to racist behavior. And according to a PBS/NPR/Marist College poll last year, members of those generations were more than twice as likely to support reparations for slavery, compared with baby boomers and others in older generations.
A Pew survey in 2018 also found a stark generational divide over whether NFL players were right to kneel in protest of racial inequality. Among millennials and teenagers in Generation Z, more than 3 in 5 expressed approval of the protests; among baby boomers and other older Americans, an equally large share said they disapproved.
Similar trends play out specifically among young black people and other people of color, who express a greater desire for sweeping change and a more unanimous suspicion of police. In a recent Washington Post/Ipsos poll of African Americans, among respondents 35 and younger, 9 out of 10 said they did not trust police to treat people of all races equally — higher than in any other age group.
Long before he declared himself “your law-and-order president” this week, President Donald Trump had put support for law enforcement at the center of his political identity.
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, Trump’s favorability rating fell significantly among certain key voting groups.
In the first three days of the poll, May 26-28, 40 percent of political independents expressed a positive view of the president; in interviews conducted over the three days that followed — starting May 29, when 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.