from:
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/10/police-reform-polls-white-black-crime.html

Americans Don’t Want to Defund the Police. Here’s What They Do Want.
BY WILLIAM SALETAN
OCT 17, 20217:00 PM
Police are seen standing inside a parking garage.
Police officers stand in a garage in the Westwood neighborhood of Los
Angeles on April 3. Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

Last month—more than a year after the murder of George Floyd, and
several months after a Minneapolis police officer was convicted for
killing him—a consortium of news organizations asked 800 Minneapolis
voters what they thought of the city’s police department. Most viewed
the department unfavorably. Nevertheless, three-quarters of the poll’s
Black respondents said the city shouldn’t reduce its police force. Black
voters were considerably more opposed to this idea than white voters
were. When the poll offered an alternative—replacing the police
department with a “Department of Public Safety,” which might include
cops but would focus on public health and be more closely supervised by
the City Council—white respondents favored the idea. But Black
respondents, on balance, rejected it.

These results were no fluke. The same thing had happened in July, when
pollsters asked similar questions in Detroit. That survey, commissioned
by the Detroit Free Press and USA Today, presented a list of eight
issues and asked residents which was the biggest one facing the city.
White respondents were slightly more likely to choose police reform than
public safety. But Black respondents named public safety as their top
concern, and they ranked police reform last. White residents opposed
defunding the police, but Black residents rejected it even more decisively.

The findings in Minneapolis and Detroit are part of a larger story. When
people are asked what they really think about criminal justice, the
answers are complicated. Many white people are open to police reform,
and many Black people are wary of curtailing law enforcement. These
aspects of public opinion are important to understand as Democratic
politicians and advocates of reform grapple with a treacherous political
environment. Floyd’s death brought sustained attention to the ongoing
problem of unjust police violence, but calls to defund the police
backfired in the 2020 elections, hurting Democrats and undermining the
movement for reform. Meanwhile, homicides surged in many cities,
alarming residents and boosting public support for law and order.
Republicans, emboldened by this support, have drawn a hard line in the
Senate, rejecting Democratic proposals to reform law enforcement.

The challenge, in short, is that crime is returning to prominence as a
national issue—whether justified or not—and Democrats haven’t figured
out how to deal with it. They want to root out bad cops, rectify racial
disparities in the criminal justice system, and rein in police practices
that have caused unnecessary deaths. But they have to do this without
getting swept up in ideas that scare many voters and don’t represent the
needs or wishes of people of color. To clarify how Americans of all
backgrounds think about these issues, I’ve looked at more than 100
recent polls. The surveys, comprising tens of thousands of interviews,
show how reformers can make a more effective case for changing the system.

Let’s start with the no-brainers. Across the political spectrum, there’s
a consensus for requiring officers to wear body cameras, mandating
independent investigations of officer-involved shootings, and creating a
national registry of police misconduct records. By 2 to 1, the public
supports banning chokeholds and no-knock search warrants. In a survey of
more than 1,800 Americans, conducted in April and May by the Associated
Press–NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, 60 percent of respondents
said police supervisors should be penalized for racially biased conduct
by their officers; only 15 percent disagreed.

There’s also broad support for easing up on prosecutions of nonviolent
first-time offenders. Two-thirds of Americans favor shorter sentences
for this group and want to let them serve time in community service,
drug rehabilitation, or some other alternative to prison.

In bipartisan Senate negotiations on police reform—which collapsed in
September—Republicans refused to abandon qualified immunity, a rule that
shields officers from being sued directly for conduct on the job. But
the public supports changing the rule. When the question is phrased
neutrally in various ways, the results are consistent: Nearly 60 percent
of Americans favor allowing such lawsuits; only about 30 percent disagree.

If you go beyond lawsuits and try to prosecute cops, however, Americans
get a lot more squeamish. In May, a Politico–Morning Consult survey
asked whether “the federal government should lower the standard for
convicting a police officer of misconduct, from willful to knowing or
reckless.” Only 42 percent of voters were ready to take that step.
That’s more than the 35 percent who opposed the idea, but probably not
enough to change the law.

One of the worst things to propose, politically, is defunding the
police. Americans reject that idea by about 40 percentage points.
Democrats and people of color are against it. The only idea that’s less
popular is abolishing the police, which, in an Economist-YouGov poll
taken this month, lost by 45 points among Black Americans, by 64 points
among Democrats, and by 76 points among all voters.

The problem with threatening to defund police is that the public likes
police. Cops have a strong favorable rating, even among liberals.
Activists who think police departments are overfunded—or that some of
their money would be better spent elsewhere—would be wise to choose less
confrontational language, such as advocating for “redirecting” money to
mental health or other community services. In polls, that language earns
the support of around 35 percent to 40 percent of Americans, but half of
the public is still against it. Softening the language again, by
promising to shift the money “gradually,” gets a little more support but
still doesn’t reach 50 percent.

To attract majority support, critics of police funding can do a couple
of things. First, they can specify that money subtracted from police
budgets would be moved not to unrelated needs, but to other kinds of
policing or emergency response. A solid majority of Americans, around 60
percent, favors shifting some police money to “community policing” or
“non-police first responder programs.” In May, an Axios-Ipsos poll
showed that this message could dramatically change the political
equation. Only 27 percent of the poll’s respondents supported defunding
police, but 57 percent endorsed moving money to community policing and
social services.

Another way to get majority support is to make it clear that any
transfer of money away from police budgets would be accompanied by a
transfer of responsibilities so that cops are relieved of certain
burdens. In April, Data For Progress, a progressive strategy group,
asked likely voters about the idea of reallocating portions of police
budgets to create a new class of first responders who would deal with
issues related to mental illness. Sixty-three percent of respondents
favored that idea. The message behind such proposals is that advocates
of reallocation aren’t trying to punish cops. They’re trying to liberate
cops from duties to which they’re ill-suited, and pay somebody else to
handle those duties instead.

But there’s a simpler way to get around the unpopularity of defunding
police: Don’t mention police budgets at all. Don’t say reallocate,
divert, or any of those words. Just talk about funding mental health
services, social workers, and non-police first responders. When
pollsters test these ideas on their own—without any suggestion that the
money would come from cops—they’re overwhelmingly popular. In a
Navigator survey taken in July, only 43 percent of voters endorsed
“moving funding away from the police into other resources, like social
services.” Most respondents opposed that idea. But in the same poll, 83
percent of voters, including 79 percent of Republicans, supported
“investing in additional services to reduce pressure on police.”

The lesson for activists and politicians is clear: Don’t talk about
defunding police. Instead, talk about investing in alternatives, and
make those alternatives work. Then we can have a conversation about how
many cops we need to handle the work that remains. And in the meantime,
rather than getting bogged down in a debate over defunding, we can talk
about how to make law enforcement work better.

A few years ago, I was talking with a group of friends about parents who
leave their kids in cars in hot weather. One person in the group, who
was Black, said that if he were to see a child in such a situation, he
would find a way to help, but he wouldn’t call the cops. I was stunned.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but my amazement was part of a larger
gulf: Many white Americans are still seriously out of touch with how
Black Americans experience law enforcement. An Axios-Ipsos survey, taken
from April through May, illustrates this gap: Most white respondents
claimed that police “look out for Black or Brown people” well, but
two-thirds of Black respondents said that wasn’t true.