Most Americans are confident in local police, but many still want major reforms

Three years after nationwide protests against police brutality and racial injustice, a majority of Americans, including Black Americans, say they feel confident in local police, according to a new report.

Data from Gallup’s Center on Black Voices revealed that 69% of Americans are confident in local police, a decrease from 2021 and 2022, when 73% of Americans said they had confidence in police. About 56% of Black Americans reported feeling confident in local law enforcement, Gallup found. About 64% of Hispanics said the same, compared with 74% of white people.

Still, Black Americans are more likely to support police reform, with 73% saying they want major changes to policing, compared with 56% of Hispanics and 48% of whites. About 53% of Americans backed police reform in the survey, which did not identify other racial groups in the results.

"Attitudes toward policing remain an important barometer of the need for and success of police reforms," the analytics and advisory company said in an analysis Monday. "It is also a matter of safety. Black Americans who report that they have confidence in their local police force are more likely to say they feel safe in other ways too."

In 2020, Americans' confidence in the police fell to a record low, driven in part by a growing racial divide on the issue, according to a Gallup poll conducted in the weeks after George Floyd was murdered by police officers in Minneapolis. About 48% of Americans said they had a "great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in police that year. That figure increased in 2021, but fell to 43% in 2023, according to Gallup's annual Confidence in Institutions poll.

Though the nation's overall confidence in the police has fluctuated, analyses show that the pattern of Black Americans’ perceptions of policing in their communities remaining less positive "has been consistent across three years of tracking," Gallup said in its analysis.

Using that same data, the Payne Center for Social Justice, a Washington D.C. think tank and research center, found that less than a third of Americans said they interacted with law enforcement in the last year. Of those that did, 71% of Black Americans said they were treated fairly during the interaction compared with 79% of Hispanic and 90% of white respondents.

The Payne Center report, which examines the overall wellbeing of Black Americans, and the Gallup analysis are based on a Gallup web study of more than 10,000 adults in the U.S. conducted in February after the high-profile death of 29-year-old Tyre Nichols, who was beaten by former Memphis police officers in January. The report found that though Black Americans and white Americans are thriving equally, "the data confirm their current life experiences are not equal."

“These findings underscore the amazing progress that has been made in our country, but also emphasize that our work is far from done,” Camille Lloyd, director of the Gallup Center on Black Voices, said in a statement. “There is a need for continued efforts to address racial disparities in the United States and to strive for the best life imaginable for all Americans, regardless of their race or ethnicity.”