81% of Black Americans Want To Maintain or Increase Police Presence in Their Neighborhood

The majority of black Americans support police maintaining their current presence in their communities, a Gallup poll released Wednesday revealed.

The Gallup panel, conducted June 23 – July 6, asked respondents, “Would you rather the police spend more time, the same amount of time or less time as they currently spend in your area?”

Despite the narrative touted by proponents of the Black Lives Matter movement, which contends that minority communities desire to see less policing in their communities, 61 percent of black Americans indicated that they want police presence to remain the same. Another 20 percent said they want to see police officers spend “more” time in their communities, and 19 percent said “less.”

Similarly, 59 percent of Hispanic Americans said they want police presence to remain the same, as do 63 percent of Asian Americans. Seventy-one percent of white Americans concurred. Notably, 24 percent of Hispanic Americans said they want to see officers spend “more time” in their area, versus 17 percent who said “less time.”

More per Gallup:

The survey also asked Americans to estimate how often they see police in their neighborhood. Black Americans’ reported exposure to local police is slightly above the national average, with 32% saying they see the police often or very often in their neighborhood. This compares with 22% of White Americans and 21% of Asian Americans. Hispanic Americans’ experience is similar to that of Black Americans, with 28% often seeing police where they live.

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The slightly elevated frequency with which Black Americans see police in their neighborhood has limited impact on their preferences for changing the local police presence. About a third of Black Americans who say they often see the police in their neighborhood think the police should spend less time there (34%); however, the majority of adults in this group think they should spend the same amount of time (56%) or more time (10%).

The survey also found that 61 percent of black Americans remain either “very” or “somewhat” confident that police would treat them with courtesy and respect, compared to 91 percent of white Americans, 77 percent of Hispanic Americans, and 78 percent of Asian Americans who feel the same way.

“Most Black Americans want the police to spend at least as much time in their area as they currently do, indicating that they value the need for the service that police provide,” Gallup reported.

The survey’s findings come as Democrat leaders nationwide make broad moves to defund the police, as demanded by many Black Lives Matter activists. Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors, a self-described trained Marxist, has called on the Democrat Party to adopt radical reforms in its party agenda, including defunding the police and dismantling the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

She, while addressing Democratic National Convention’s (DNC) party platform, said in part:

Until and unless our leaders become signatory to the BREATHE Act — to legislation that eliminates the federal government’s ability to give multi-million dollar grants to militarize police forces; dismantles punitive like ICE, Border Patrol, and the DEA; ends the use of surveillance systems being used to target protesters; and bans the use of police agencies to suppress political dissent — the Democratic Party of today will be remembered as the party of complicity. The party that refuses to sacrifice its own creature comforts and material securities to ensure it walked the walk. So before you leave today, I want you to answer this question for yourselves: Which side of history is my party actually on?

The Trump administration, however, has vowed to continue to back law enforcement.

“We’re not going to defund the police. We’re going to fund law enforcement,” Vice President Mike Pence said during a Tuesday appearance on Breitbart News Daily.

Listen:

“We’re going to back the blue, even while we work to improve public safety and improve the lives of all of the families in our cities, all of the minority families, African American, Hispanic American, and every family impacted by the scourge of violence that’s frankly gone on for too long in too many American cities,” the vice president added.