A recent survey found six out of 10 Black men in the United States say they have experienced unfair treatment at the hands of police and that race was the primary cause, according to the Associated Press (AP).
“It’s been like this for a long time,” said Larry Washington, 30, of Merrillville, Indiana. “It’s just now that everybody’s starting to record it and stuff, it’s just hitting the spotlight. Most Caucasians, they think it’s just starting to go on when it’s been like this.”
The survey was done by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research as the one year anniversary of the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri approached.
“Seventy-two percent of Whites said they always or often trust police to do right by them and their community, while 66 percent of Blacks said they only sometimes, rarely or never trust the police to do what is right,” the AP reported.
According to the survey, only 3 percent of Whites say that their treatment by law enforcement has been unfair due to their race.
The AP reported 74 percent of Whites believe race is not a factor in how police in their communities choose to use lethal force while 71 percent of Blacks believe law enforcement is prone to use lethal force against Blacks. Eight-five percent of Blacks said the same thing generally applied across the United States.
“White Americans who live in more diverse communities — where census data show at least 25 percent of the population is non-white — were more likely than other whites to say police in their communities mistreat minorities…” 6 of 10 Black Men Report Police Treat Them Unfairly the survey reported.
The poll numbers reflect 62 percent of Whites saying police violence happens in large part to civilians confronting police, instead of cooperating with them when stopped. Seventy-five percent of Blacks said the reason for mistreatment rests in the fact that a police officer’s misconduct is seldom prosecuted when excessive force is used.
Seventy percent of Blacks identified problems with race relations, along with poor police-community relations, as major reason for police violence, the poll said.
In Milwaukee County Wisconsin sheriff David A. Clarke Jr. said Blacks have more run-ins with the law than Whites due to the nature of crime rates in urban environments.
“If you have more interaction with the police because of the crime and the disorder in our urban centers — the American ghetto I like to say it — it’s going to skew the numbers,” Clarke said.
“Everything is not right, but it’s better. We have bad cops and we have good cops. I don’t know where we’re going to from here, but we need police,” said David Thomas, 80, of Vienna, Georgia.
The AP polled 1,223 adults randomly; of this number 311 were Black. The poll was done over a three day period in July utilizing a sample from NORC’s probability-based “Amerispeak panel” representing the U.S. population. The margin of error among Black respondents is plus or minus 9.1 percentage points.
