By Police1 Staff
A new poll conducted by Ipsos/USA TODAY found that fewer than one in five Americans support the ‘defund the police’ movement, according to USA TODAY. The poll, which was conducted over two days last week, surveyed an online sample of 1,165 people.
According to USA TODAY, 18% of respondents supported the movement known as “defund the police,” and 58% said they opposed it. Although the data showed some clear splits along race and party lines, the demographics were not a rule. While white Americans (67%) and Republicans (84%) were much more likely to oppose the movement, only 28% of Black Americans and 34% of Democrats were in favor of it.
When respondents were asked if they thought the police should be abolished or eliminated, 67% overall said they were opposed, including a majority of Black Americans and Democrats, according to USA TODAY.
Respondents were less opposed to the idea of redirecting police funds to social services, but 57% were still against the idea. According to USA Today, those numbers represented a slight decline from August when 53% were opposed and 47% were in favor of redirecting police spending.
Respondent Valda Pugh, 67, from Louisville, Kentucky, believes that the decrease could come from a lexical miscommunication.
“When it first surfaced, I think people had the wrong definition of what [defund the police] meant,” Pugh told USA Today. “We still obviously need a police force. We need them in full force."
Respondent Steve Laskowitz, 73, of Boca Raton, Florida, agreed.
“I think it’s misguided,” Laskowitz told USA Today. “I don’t think anybody wants to defund the police. I think we might want to restructure how the police budget is spent, better training, better analysis of the people who become police and more efforts towards community involvement.”
Ipsos measured the poll’s “credibility interval,” which it put at plus or minus 3.3 percentage points, according to USA TODAY.