5 Things You Should Know About Policing In America

The Public Has Respect For and Are Confident in the Police, but Lack Understanding

One topic that is brought up often is that the public has supposedly turned against police. This is, broadly speaking, not true. According to Gallup, a whopping seventy-six percent of people have “a great deal of respect” for their local police. An additional seventeen percent report “some respect” for police. Respect for police has skyrocketed since 2015. This implies that the massive increase in respect for cops is related to the rise of Black Lives Matter and anti-police rhetoric in general. This trend is not only for whites either. Nonwhites also have shown massive increases in respect for police.

In another Gallup poll, we see that fifty six percent of Americans great confidence in police. An additional twenty-nine percent have “some” confidence. According to this study, there is a difference in confidence among racial groups, with whites having the most confidence. It is worth noting, that police enjoy more confidence than any other institution with the exception of the military. Police enjoy double the confidence of the justice system as a whole and six times that of congress.

Despite this respect and confidence, police believe that the public still does not understand them. Approximately eighty-three percent of the public believe they understand the challenges of policing. In contrast, eighty percent of officers say that the public does not understand.