Gallup Poll: Police Hold Confidence of Average American
LEON HARRIS, CNN ANCHOR: In the wake of Wednesday's videotaped police beating story from Philadelphia, how do Americans feel about the police?</s>LINDA STOUFFER, CNN ANCHOR: Well, Gallup Poll editor-in-chief Frank Newport has been asking that question. He joins us now with some of the answers. Frank, good morning.</s>FRANK NEWPORT, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF, GALLUP POLL: Good morning, Linda and Leon. In fact, just a couple of weeks ago, we updated our annual Gallup Confidence in Institutions series, which we've been doing for a number of years, where we ask Americans to say how confident are you in a variety of different major institutions in society. Now, in answer to the question, the bottom line is: Police, overall in society, and this is very important given what happened in Philadelphia, still have a great deal of confidence from the average American. Now what we did is we took our long list here and just excerpted it for here, the top five. Interestingly, particularly since the Gulf War, it's been the military which has the most confidence of any institution we test, actually above the organized religion or church. But there comes the police, 54 percent of Americans say they are -- have quite a lot or some confidence in police, which is very, very high on a relative basis, actually above the Supreme Court and above banks, which form the next two. By the way, at the very bottom of the list are HMOs and Congress. Those are the institutions Americans have the least confidence, and maybe not surprising. Now we've tracked this confidence in police since earlier this decade. Now, remember, Rodney King was in 1991, we started using police in 1993 and it was at 52. And basically hadn't changed a lot. By the middle of the decade it was up to about 60, as you can see. But in the last couple of weeks ago, again, right before the Philadelphia incident I should point out, it was at 54 percent. But, this is a key, and we find it consistently in our data. There is a big gulf between blacks and non-whites in American society and whites in terms of any question we ask about police. Here it is, confidence in police and look at the difference: 57 percent confidence for whites, but for non-whites in American society, primarily African-Americans, you can see 38 percent confidence. So there's that 20-point swing that we consistently find, which might have been, again, exacerbated by that videotape in Philadelphia, with the African-American perpetrator who was being allegedly beaten by the police. One other disturbing trend is age. The younger you are, the lower the confidence in police. Look at those 18 to 29 years over there, only 43 percent, confidence goes up as you get older. That's where the public stands, in terms of confidence in the major institution in our society, police. Back to you in Atlanta, Leon and Linda.</s>HARRIS: All right, thanks, Frank.