Excerpts from the news article that inspired this post:
"I want people to respect the opinions and feelings of Black people and allow us to decide what is in our best interest," Breed told Vogue. "I talk about the plan to reduce the police budget and reallocate those resources to the African American community, and a large number of non-Blacks reached out to tell me what I should do for the Black community. Then, they say what their community deserves because of their challenges as well. That really bothered me. The Black community [of San Francisco] is capable of speaking for ourselves and deciding what’s in our best interest.
Polling from the Pew Research Center has shown that just 22% of African-Americans want police funding "decreased a lot," with the overwhelming majority favoring small decreases, no change, or even increases. Breed's proposal to reallocate some funding was met with pushback from some white progressives who accused her of not going far enough. This prompted protests at Breed's home, protests she was not happy about.
"The people who came out to my home last time, they were all white and wearing masks and walking with these 'firework sticks' down the street chanting 'Black Lives Matter!'" she said. "But then they get to my house and start shooting these fireworks off and aiming them at my window and banging on the gate and calling me names to come outside. It was like, what? In the projects, when you come to somebody’s house, you are coming to get your butt beat. Because I will come out and throw some grits on you if you don’t back up!"
- London Breed, Mayor of San Francisco, quoted in SF Mayor London Breed shreds white progressives for projecting beliefs onto city's Black residents. San Francisco Chronicle July 18, 2020
What caught my eye when first reading the SF Chronicle piece was its reference to Pew Research polling data that “just 22% of African-Americans want police funding ‘decreased a lot’”. Say what! I spend hours every day consuming local and national news but this was the first I heard of the Pew survey - which turns out to be a month old. I’ll leave it up to the reader to speculate why this story was ignored by the major News outlets (or, at the very least, my Google News aggregator).
Here’s a nice chart of the Pew respondent breakdown on police funding:
I’m going to take a leap here and assume advocates of police defunding generally want to decrease police funding a lot, not a little. If this is the case, then per the above Pew survey 9% of whites, 22% of blacks, and 12% of Hispanics support defunding the police. In contrast, 77% of whites, 55% of blacks, and 76% of Hispanics want police funding to stay the same or increase. I am not detecting a mass movement to defund the police here.
How about support for Black Lives Matter?
A few weeks ago an acquaintance argued that most Americans supported the ideas of Black Lives Matters, citing a recent survey to this effect. I found the survey (a CBS News Poll), which had one question regarding agreement with BLM ideas. Here is the question and response options:
The CBS poll did not provide examples of the “ideas expressed by the Black Lives Matter movement”. Nor did the poll include an open-ended question asking the respondents to list some BLM ideas they agreed or disagreed with. That’s important, because many ideas are expressed in the name of Black Lives Matter, from protesting “police brutality and all racially motivated violence against African-American people” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Lives_Matter) to “dismantling White Supremacy, Patriarchy, Capitalism, Imperialism and the role the state plays in supporting them.” (https://www.blacklivesmatterdmv.org/). It’s not exactly news that most American are against police brutality but “dismantle Capitalism”?
I’ll close with some advice. When you come across a news item about survey results, find the original survey questions and response options and judge for yourself what the real story is.