In the years preceding the deaths of Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin and Freddie Gray, more than half of young black Americans said they or someone they knew experienced harassment or violence from police, according to a new report.
The report, released by the Black Youth Project at the Study of Race, Politics and Culture at the University of Chicago on Wednesday,compiled data collected from several surveys conducted over the past decade to reveal dramatically different attitudes among black, Latino, white and Asian millennials concerning policing, guns and America’s legal system.
The report included data from a 2009 survey in which 54.4% of black millennials said they or someone they knew had been harassed or treated violently at the hands of the police – compared to 32.8% of white millennials and 24.8% of Latino millennials.
“In their everyday lives, black youth are deeply ambivalent – if not outright cynical – about the police who patrol their communities,” the authors of the report wrote. “These attitudes are widespread among black youth, and were present even before the national news was dominated by events like those in Ferguson, Baltimore and Charleston.”
According to the same survey, less than half of black millennials said they trusted police, compared with almost 60% of Latino youth and more than 70% of white youth.
The report comes as national attention has been rising over policing and federal sentencing laws, brought on bythe Black Lives Matter movement.
Yet despite recent debate over police reform, two-thirds of black millennials surveyed said that they believed the police in their neighborhoods were there to protect them.
“We know that young blacks are more likely to be harassed by the police. We know that they are more likely to mistrust their encounters with the police,” Cathy Cohen, chair of the political science department at the University of Chicago and leader of the Black Youth Project, told the Associated Press. “But we also know from actually collecting data that a majority of them believe that police in their neighborhood are actually there to protect them, so I think it provides us with more complexity.”
Another survey included in the report conducted by the Black Youth Project, in 2013, found that the percentage of black and Latino millennials who said they knew people who carried guns had declined, but more of them knew someone who was a victim of gun violence. They were far more likely to say they were “very” or “somewhat” afraid of gun violence compared to white youths, the report said.
The difference in the way black and white youths feel about these issues is unsurprising, said Jon Rogowski, co-author of the report and assistant political science professor at Washington University in St Louis. White millennials don’t report having to explain themselves to police, for instance, while millennials of color report that officers stopped them simply to question what they were up to, he said.
“We see story after story about how this leads into a more combative situation which has escalated and led to, in some instances, tragic outcomes,” Rogowski told the Associated Press. “So the experiences that these different communities have had based on where they live and the kinds of policing procedures that are in place there, we would argue, lead to these different patterns.”
The report also compiled data examining incarceration rates between 2003 and 2013 among American youth, and found that rates were significantly higher for young black men and women. In 2013, more than 10% of black men ages 18-19 were incarcerated – or 1,092 of every 100,000 – compared to 115 young white men and 412 Latino men of those ages. The disparities were similar among other age groups under 30 years old.
Black millennials also said not everyone gets fair treatment from the legal system in the US after arrest. They are not alone in this feeling: only 38% of all millennials agreed with the statement that “the American legal system treats all groups fairly” in the 2014 survey.
