by Bryan Babb
The number of Americans who want to see an increase in funding for local police has risen to nearly half since June 2020, according to a Tuesday Pew Research poll.
Forty-seven percent of Americans say spending on policing should increase in their community, up from 31% in June 2020, according to the poll. The poll found that 21% of respondents felt police funding should be increased by “a lot,” marking an 11% increase from the same period.
Amid mounting public concern about violent crime in the U.S., Americans’ attitudes about police funding in their own community have shifted: The share who say spending on policing in their area should rise is now 47%, up from 31% in June 2020. https://t.co/dD704YgOak pic.twitter.com/EFPwalQPud
— Pew Research Center (@pewresearch) October 26, 2021
Meanwhile, calls for reducing police funding have decreased by 25% since June 2020, with only 15% of adults supporting a reduction in spending. Of the 15%, only 6% said that police funding should decrease “a lot,” according to the poll.
Additionally, the poll found that 37% of Americans think current police budgets should remain unchanged.
The poll follows a record-breaking nationwide murder increase in 2020, which also saw violent crime on the rise for the first time in four years. A separate July Pew poll reported that 61% of Americans felt violent crime is a “very big” issue the country is facing, up from 41% in June 2020.
“The demonization of the police has made our communities and law enforcement jobs less safe,” National Fraternal Order of Police President Patrick Yoes told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “We have seen violent crime skyrocket in cities across the county.”
“All Americans want and deserve to feel safe in their communities,” he added. “Our nation’s law enforcement officers put on their uniforms every day in every community in our country because of their unwavering commitment to serve the public.”
The poll was conducted from Sept. 13 to Sept. 19 among 11,505 adults with a margin of error of 1.6 percentage points.
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Bryan Babb is a reporter at Daily Caller News Foundation.
Photo “Police” by Rama. CC BY-SA 2.0.
