Attitudes Toward The Police Five Years After George Floyd’s Death

Lost in much of the news coverage of the 5th anniversary of George Floyd’s death were reports on how Americans, especially black Americans, view their local police now. News reports focused on reforms of police practices and possible actions by the Trump administration. Yet the passage of time has affected opinions of both blacks and whites.

Gallup has a large reservoir of polls that ask people about racial attitudes generally and about views of local police. In their averaging of four polls from 2024, Gallup found that blacks’ confidence in their local police force now stands at 64%, nine points above the low of 55% in 2022. Black confidence was still significantly below white confidence, at 77%. In another question, slightly more than two-thirds of blacks, 67%, said local police treat people like them fairly. This response was also up nearly 10 points from 2022, when 58% gave that response.

Polling organizations conducted a significant number of new polls after George Floyd’s death in 2020. Americans generally saw his death at the hands of police officer Derek Chauvin as murder, and the polls showed that large numbers of whites and nonwhites said his killing was not an isolated incident. After Chauvin’s trial, a CBS News/YouGov poll in 2021 found that 75% of those surveyed thought that the jury had reached the right verdict in convicting him.

In polls taken at the time, blacks reported they had had more negative interactions with police than their white counterparts. But one finding in the polling was especially intriguing. More blacks than whites (41% to 33%) in a June 2020 Monmouth University poll said they or a family member had had an experience where a police officer helped keep them safe in a potentially dangerous situation.

Many reforms targeting police misconduct have enjoyed widespread public support. Large majorities have endorsed body camera requirements and a ban on chokeholds, for example. But whites and blacks did not endorse defunding the police, as the results of an Ipsos/USA Today poll showed. Support for reforming the police was 51%, while 19% opposed this, and nearly three in ten, (29%), neither supported nor opposed it. But support for defunding the police was 18% (14% among whites and 28% among blacks), while 11% supported abolishing the police (9% and 22%).

Low levels of support for defunding the police may explain why support for the Black Lives Matter movement and its campaign to defund the police has been consistently lower than support for the police as a whole and local police. Over the years the Harris/Harvard Center for American Political Studies has asked about police and Black Lives Matter favorability. In their new mid-May poll, 66% of registered voters had a favorable opinion of the police (22% unfavorable), with the positive response trailing only that of the top-rated institution, the military, at 77%. But in seven polls taken in 2024, support for Black Lives Matter among registered voters was around 45%. It never reached a majority. (Harvard/Harris has not asked about Black Lives Matter in 2025).

What makes the new Gallup finding and that of other polls of an uptick in police favorability among blacks important is that we have seen this pattern before. Pollsters do not regularly track reactions to individuals killed by police, but occasional polls frequently show opinion of the police returning to the level of polls taken immediately after such an instance. A 1997 Public Opinion Quarterly article “Racial Differences in Attitudes toward the Police” by Stephen A. Tuch and Ronald Weitzer showed this pattern beginning with the killing of Eulia Love, a black woman killed by Los Angeles Police Department officers in 1979 through the beating of a black man Rodney King by the LAPD in 1991. A series of polls taken by Quinnipiac University in New York City after the deaths there of Amandou Diallo by New York City police officers in 1999 and Sean Bell in 2006 shows the same pattern of a steep drop but a gradual return to more positive attitudes. Between 2016 and 2020, the Pew Research Center showed a sharp drop in views that police were doing an excellent or good job on conduct such as using the right amount of force, but then recorded an uptick in 2023.

Reforms of police misconduct are necessary, but most Americans and especially most black Americans tell pollsters they need and want police in their neighborhoods and communities, and a considerable number of them say the police have helped them.