Race reason for unfair police treatment
Print Edition
A MAJORITY of African-Americans — more than 3 out of 5 — say they or a family member have personal experience with being treated unfairly by the police, and their race is the reason why.
The information, from a survey by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, comes as the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, approaches its first anniversary and the nation continues to grapple with police-related deaths of black Americans.
African-Americans said they felt especially targeted by the police. Half said they had been treated unfairly by police because of their race, compared with 3 percent of whites. Another 15 percent said they knew of a family member who had been treated unfairly by the police because of their race.
White Americans who live in more diverse communities — those where census data show at least 25 percent of the population is non-white — were more likely than other whites to say police in their communities sometimes treat minorities more roughly, 58 percent to 42 percent. And they’re more likely to see the police as too quick to use deadly force, 42 percent to 29 percent.
Larry Washington, 30, of Merriville, Indiana, described his encounter with a white police officer when he was arrested for theft in Burbank, Illinois, as a teenager. “When I got to the police station, the officer who arrested me told me that I looked like I wanted to do something about it,” Washington said. “He kept calling me ‘nigger.’”
“It’s been like this for a long time,” Washington said. “It’s just now that everybody is starting to record it and stuff, it’s just hitting the spotlight. Most Caucasians, they think it’s just starting to go on when it’s been like this.”
The poll shows stark differences between whites and blacks when it came to attitudes toward law enforcement:
More than two-thirds of blacks thought police are treated too leniently when they hurt or kill people. Nearly half of whites say the police are treated fairly.
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