Poll: Police harassment familiar to young blacks and Hispanics

Associated Press

DETROIT

Crystal Webb cringes whenever a patrol car appears in her rearview mirror. She also never wants to see the inside of a police station again.

Her personal experience with police, plus recent fatal shootings of unarmed black men by white officers, has led the Apple Valley, Calif., mother of two to ask: Who are the good guys and who are bad?

“You are the people I’m supposed to go to when I’m in trouble,” Webb says of police.

Two-thirds of young African-Americans and 4 in 10 Hispanics say that they or someone they know has experienced violence or harassment at the hands of the police, according to a new GenForward poll. That includes about 2 in 10 in each group who say that was a personal experience, including about 3 in 10 black men who say the same.

But the poll also shows that young people still want a police presence in their communities.

GenForward is a survey of adults age 18 to 30 by the Black Youth Project at the University of Chicago with the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. The first-of-its-kind poll pays special attention to the voices of young adults of color, highlighting how race and ethnicity shape the opinions of a new generation.

Those poll results come after the killing of several young black men by police around the country. Two of the more-recent killings were the July 5 shooting death of Alton Sterling during a struggle with officers in Baton Rouge, La., and the fatal shooting of Philando Castile the following day by an officer in a suburb of St. Paul, Minn.