A Pew report shows that nearly a third of white Americans under the age of 30 have “cold” feelings for the police. Recent court rulings and decisions made by the Trump administration this year might help explain why.
Less than a year into the post-Obama milieu, yet another major police shooting trial—the Jason Stockley case in St. Louis—produced a widely denounced verdict that reminds us how difficult it is to hold police officers accountable when they murder African Americans. Then-St. Louis police officer Stockley shot and killed Anthony Lamar Smith as he fled off in a vehicle. This happened in 2011, almost three years before the police killing of Michael Brown in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson. Which means it happened years before the21st Century Policing reforms that followed the outrage and national outcry behind the Ferguson police killing.
The verdict in the Stockley case, however, arrived last week, well after the installation of those reforms, which were an attempt at a policing reconstruction era of sorts. Those reforms are currently being starved out by the Trump administration, though, before they even had a chance to kick in.
Which might explain why attitudes toward police haven’t changed. On the same day as the Stockley verdict, the Pew Research Center released survey data showing that there is still a wide divide between how African Americans and white Americans feel about the police. Roughly 40 percent of African Americans view police “coldly,” or unfavorably, compared with 73 percent of whites who have “warm,” or favorable views of police, according to Pew. Such wide racial divergence in attitudes toward police are consistent with what Pew picked up in past studies on the subject, going back to 2007.
[For more on this story by Brentin Mock, go to https://www.citylab.com/equity...oward-police/540456/]
Photo: Demonstrators march in response to a not guilty verdict in the trial of former St. Louis police officer Jason Stockley. Jeff Roberson/AP
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