The history of policing in America is an indisputably violent one. Many American police departments have their origins in White supremacist violence—for example, hunting down Black Americans who had freed themselves from enslavement and returning them to their captors.
Yet the specific form of racially targeted and increasingly militarized policing to which Americans have grown accustomed is not the only approach. …
We asked 1,500 Americans—selected using Prolific Academic’s ‘nationally representative quota sample’ to resemble the general US population with regard to age, gender and ethnicity—whether they supported defunding the police, to what extent they saw the police legitimate, how willing they were to cooperate with law enforcement, and about their perceptions of police fairness, racial bias, misconduct and violence. The data were collected in late June, just after the killing of George Floyd by a police officer and the resulting resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement. CONT.
Jonathan Jackson, et al, LSE USAPP