After a long spell of support-sapping police clashes dating to the August 2014 cop shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., confidence in the nation’s men and women in blue has bounced back from a 22-year low.
Gallup reports in its latest survey that confidence is now at 56 percent, with just 1 percent saying that they have “no confidence” in police.
“Confidence is essentially back to where it was before a series of highly publicized incidents involving white police officers and young black men in several communities across the country,” said a Gallup analysis from Frank Newport, the survey company’s editor in chief.
“Last year, confidence tied the record low of 52 percent, reflecting police actions in Ferguson, Mo., and other cities, before rebounding modestly this year as these events faded from the news,” he wrote in the analysis that charted the roller-coaster graph of cop support.
The death of Brown prompted weeks of riots in the city just a few miles from St. Louis and helped spark the Black Lives Matter movement.
The numbers from Newport: “At this point, 25 percent of Americans say they have a great deal of confidence in the police, 31 percent quite a lot, 29 percent ‘some,’ 13 percent ‘very little’ and 1 percent ‘none.’ The combined 14 percent who have very little or no confidence in the police is down from 18 percent last year, which was the highest negative confidence reading in Gallup’s history of rating the police.”
There is a divide among whites and blacks, however, likely the result of recent clashes between police and African Americans. In the poll, 62 percent of whites have confidence in police, while just 39 percent of blacks do.
Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner’s “Washington Secrets” columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]
