Support for Cutting Law Enforcement Funding has Spiked in the Wake of the Recent Protests
By Bennett Fleming-Wood, Yonatan Margalit, and Brian Schaffner, Tufts University
After George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police on May 25th, 2020, protests erupted in every state in the country. Activists and groups a part of and affiliated with the Black Lives Matter movement brought widespread attention to the state of systemic racism and police brutality against Black Americans and are calling for actionable change to institutionalized systems of racism. The protests have already led to some victories. Minneapolis voted to defund their police department following pressure from activists and protestors, and the city intends to establish a holistic, community-based public safety network.
Calls to defund the police remind us that police reforms, many of which have already been enacted by police departments, are not sufficient to keep Black Americans safe from police violence. Still, House Democrats have not embraced calls from activists to defund the police on a federal level and are instead pushing for a bill to demand reform to police departments. Democratic leaders appear to be reluctant to endorse defunding the police, largely due to it being viewed as a divisive slogan.
We know that acknowledgement of racism has increased in response to recent protests – just in the past 8 months there has been a 12 point increase in the share of white Americans who acknowledge that they have advantages in the United States. But, how have attitudes towards police funding changed as a result of the recent protests?
Current polling tells us that support for defunding the police is not clear-cut. Fivethirtyeight.com averaged the results of five polls from early June of this year and found that an average of 31 percent of Americans support defunding the police, while 58 percent are opposed. However, support for decreasing funds to the police changes with different approaches to question wording. A Huffington Post and YouGov poll from early June found that 44 percent of Americans support shifting funding away from police departments and towards social services.
These polls are instructive, but it is also useful to see how opinion has shifted on questions that were asked in surveys fielded before and after the protests. Since 2014, the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) has been asking Americans whether they think that their state governments should increase, decrease, or maintain how much they spend on law enforcement. To examine how attitudes on law enforcement funding have shifted in the wake of the recent protests, we included this very same question on the June 23rd wave of the Data for Progress tracking poll. In order to maximize comparability with the CCES surveys, we re-weighted the Data for Progress poll so that it matched the 2018 CCES survey’s demographic and political characteristics.
While our poll did not specifically use the phrase ‘defund the police’, we still see a massive spike in support for decreasing funding for law enforcement in 2020 after Black Lives Matter protests spread across the nation. The following graph shows overall support among American adults for decreasing, increasing, or maintaining police budgets since 2014. Before 2020, support for increasing police budgets was significantly higher than support for maintaining or decreasing funding. Between 2014-2018, only around one-in-ten Americans said law enforcement funding should be cut. However, by June 2020 there is a nearly 15 percentage point increase in support for reducing spending on law enforcement, with about one-fourth of Americans now saying police should receive less funding. Notably, there has also been a 14 point drop in support for spending more on law enforcement since 2018.
Which Americans specifically have changed their minds about police funding in 2020? We find that race, age, and partisanship are important factors in understanding national opinion on police funding.
The next graph plots support for cutting law enforcement funding among white and POC Americans. While ideally we could track attitudes among all racial groups separately, the sample size for the 2020 survey was too small to allow for meaningful analyses among different POC respondents. Fortunately, the 2020 CCES will have a sufficiently large sample to make it possible to track these patterns separately for many different racial and ethnic groups. Nonetheless, the patterns in the graph below are still noteworthy.
The 2014, 2016, and 2018 CCES surveys showed that white and POC Americans saw nearly eye-to-eye on the issue of law enforcement funding. For both groups, support for decreasing spending on law enforcement hovered in the 7-11 percent range. Though POC Americans supported cutting police funding slightly more than white Americans prior to 2020, the difference was quite small. But this changed in 2020. While white support for cutting law enforcement funding more than doubled in our 2020 survey, POC support for law enforcement funding cuts more than tripled. Now, about 19% of white Americans and about one-third of POC Americans support law enforcement funding cuts.
Many of those participating in the recent protests have been younger Americans. Support for cutting police funding has risen from its 2018 levels among all age groups, but 18-34 year olds have seen the biggest increase with support more than tripling among this age group – from 15 percent in 2018 to 47 percent now. This means that nearly half of young American adults now support cutting police funding. There was also a tripling of support among Americans who are 65 or older, but starting from a much lower baseline. Just 3 percent of the oldest age cohort supported cutting police funding in 2018 and that figure increased to 10 percent in our recent survey.
Finally, and unsurprisingly, partisanship is also a significant factor in understanding attitudes toward police funding. Polling from early June found that Democrats and Independents are especially likely to support shifting money away from police departments and toward “local programs for homelessness, mental health assistance, and domestic violence.” Our research looks at attitudes among white Americans by political party and finds that white Democrats are especially likely to have shifted their views on cutting law enforcement funding.
In 2018, there were only small partisan gaps in support for cutting law enforcement funding. In 2020, however, a large partisan gap has emerged. While support for smaller police budgets among white Independents and Republicans increases almost two-fold between 2018 and 2020, support in each group is still fairly low with only 15 percent of Independents and 7 percent of Republicans saying the police should get less funding. The largest change between 2018 and 2020 happens among white Democrats, where we see an almost 30 point increase in support for cutting law enforcement funding. In 2020, 40 percent of white Democrats support cutting law enforcement funding. Fewer than one-in-four white Democrats now supports increasing funding for law enforcement.
While House Democrats may be concerned about the political backlash that could come from a full-throated endorsement of defunding the police, there is dramatically increasing support for cutting spending on law enforcement among young voters, people of color, and white Democrats. The fact that we see a sudden groundswell of support for cutting spending on law enforcement shows that activism and education about systemic racism and police brutality is changing how people think about the future of policing in America.
Bennett Fleming-Wood (@bennettfw36) is a rising senior majoring in political science at Tufts University.
Yonatan Margalit (@tunadahuman) is a rising junior majoring in political science at Tufts University.
Brian F. Schaffner (@b_schaffner) is the Newhouse Professor of Civic Studies at Tisch College and the Department of Political Science at Tufts University.