Most Black Millennials Know Someone Harassed by Cops, Majority of Young Whites Don’t: Survey Says
Photo By: New York Daily News/Getty images
Police brutality is something that young blacks not only read about in newspapers -- they actually live it, suggests a new study.
Just more than half of African American millennials polled for the study indicated that they or someone they knew suffered harassment or violence from police, according to the “Black Millennials in America” report.
But only about 30 percent of young whites had a similar view in the report released earlier this month by the Black Youth Project at the Study of Race, Politics and Culture at the University of Chicago.
“Over the last 20 years, much of the conversation around policing has revolved around racial profiling and other differences in how various communities are treated, due in no small part to “stop and frisk” policing strategies and the deaths of people like Amadou Diallok, Sean Bell, Eric Garner, and Michael Brown,” said Jon Rogowski, co-author of the report and an assistant political science professor at Washington University in St. Louis.
“The anecdotal evidence certainly suggested that young Black millennials have had different kinds of experiences than young whites,” he added. “But the data has not been there. Our survey findings reflect what has been reported for decades, one story at a time, and the black youth are likely to have different sets of experiences than young whites.”
The report also found that only 44 percent of young African Americans trust the police, while nearly 72 percent of young whites do.
“The data suggest that the different kinds of experiences black millennials have with the police compared with young whites is responsible for the differences in the level of trust,” Rogowski said. “When black communities report being victims of police harassment, we are seeing that has implications for their degree of trust in the police.”
In another finding, however, the majority of both races believed police in their neighborhoods were there “to protect” them – 66 percent of African Americans thought so, while 80 percent of whites agreed.
“Large majorities of all young people believed the police in their neighborhood were there to protect them,” Rogowski said. “This provides us with some added complexity where we have to think that the link between experiences with police and how those communities view the police is a little more complicated than what we might think at first glance.”
The survey was conducted with about 450-500 people ages 18-29. The report was co-authored by Cathy Cohen, chair of the political science department at the University of Chicago.
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