President Joe Biden traveled to New York City Thursday to meet with new mayor and former police captain Eric Adams and to discuss rising gun crime and violence against the police after the killing of two officers in Harlem. For some time, polls have shown increasing public concern about crime and calls to defund the police have been replaced by calls to refund them. An indication of the political sensitivity of the issue came last June when Biden laid out a crime prevention strategy that enabled communities to use leftover COVID funds to beef up police departments. In the latest ABC News/Ipsos poll, 34 percent approved of the way Biden is handling crime.

The intense media and polling focus on problems in policing after the killing of George Floyd and the demonstrations that followed never provided a full picture of public attitudes about the police. Over the years, Americans have had a relatively high level of confidence in the police, although White and Black attitudes have differed sharply. In 1993, when Gallup first asked about the police in its confidence in institutions battery, 52 percent had high confidence (a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in the pollster’s formulation). In 2021, 51 percent gave that response, up from a low of 48 percent in 2020. In 2021, 56 percent of Whites compared to 27 percent of Blacks had high confidence. The abysmally low 27 percent represented a small uptick from 2020 when only 19 percent expressed high confidence.

The racial differences in overall confidence obscure areas where views have grown closer over time. In 1969, when Lou Harris asked whether Blacks were discriminated against in the way they were treated by the police, 19 percent of Whites compared to 76 percent of Blacks said this was the case. In a June 2020 AP-NORC poll taken the month after George Floyd’s killing, 70 percent of Whites compared to 90 percent of Blacks said Whites were treated more fairly by the police. Thirty-two percent of Whites and 22 percent of nonwhites in a Washington Post/University of Maryland poll from the same month believed Floyd’s killing was an isolated incident. Majorities of each group (68 percent White, 75 percent nonwhite) said his killing was a sign of broader problems in the treatment of Black Americans by the police.

Black and White responses about the police are also more closely aligned when people are asked about the police in their own communities. In a Quinnipiac University poll from June 2020, 83 percent of Whites and 52 percent of Blacks approved of the police in their local communities. In a Monmouth University poll taken days after Floyd’s killing in May 2020, 33 percent of Whites compared to 41 percent of Blacks said they or an immediate family member had ever had an experience where the police had kept them safe in a dangerous situation. In an October 2021 Harvard Center for Political Studies/Harris poll, 84 percent of Whites and 71 percent of Blacks said major cities needed more police in their communities.

In the weeks following Floyd’s death, an ABC News/Ipsos poll from early June showed that 57 percent of Blacks supported the “defund the police” movement. Only 26 percent of Whites gave this response. However, in an Axios/Ipsos poll taken almost a year later in April and May 2021, the number of Blacks wanting to defund dropped to 41 percent. White attitudes were stable at 21 percent.

In a 1997 Public Opinion Quarterly article “Racial Differences in Attitudes Toward the Police,” Steven A. Tuch and Ronald Weitzer looked at reactions of Los Angeles residents to three incidents involving the police. Awareness of each incident was high. In each case, they found that as memories of the incidents receded, opinion about the police among Whites and Blacks returned roughly to the pre-incident level. An examination of Quinnipiac University polls in New York City from 1997 through 2014 showed a similar pattern. Results from recent Harvard CAPS/Harris polls reinforce this pattern. In their June 2020 poll, 60 percent of Americans had a very favorable or favorable view of the police. Over the rest of the year and into 2021, opinions improved to a high of 74 percent in May 2021. In the latest asking from January, favorability sits at two-thirds.

Rising crime and especially long-standing public worries about the issue, Adams’ election, and the successful prosecution of several bad cops, have changed the always potent politics of crime.

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