Police brutality?

There are a couple of survey questions about views of the police which go back to the 1960s.  One is "In some places in the nation there have been charges of police brutality. Do you think there is any police brutality in this area, or not?"  It was asked in 1965, 1967, a few times in the 1990s, and in 2005.  I have written about it before, and noted that the belief that there was police brutality in "this area" was higher in the 1990s and after than in the 1960s, but I didn't break it down by race, so I'll do that here.*  The individual level data for 2005 are not available, so I use surveys from 1965, 1967, 1991, and 1999.
                  
              Is                   Isn't
        White  Black         White    Black
1965        7%      34%          82%      46%
1967        5%      15%          83%      59%
1991       36%      60%          58%      39%
1999       35%      64%          60%      30%

I computed log-linear models (treating don't know as a middle answer) and got the following estimates of the racial gap in opinions:





 The difference is largest in 1965.  There's enough uncertainty in the estimates so it's hard to say if it's a downward trend or a difference between 1965 and all later years.  But the major thing is that belief in the existence of police brutality in "your area" increased among both blacks and whites.  Why?  One possibility would be that it actually did.  However, I think it's more likely that it's because media coverage increased and people talked about it more.  In support of this interpretation, there were a lot of "don't know's" in the 1960s (20%-25% among blacks), but few in the 1990s.  I think that there's been a general tendency for don't know's to decline, although I haven't studies it systematically or seen any research, but this change is unusually large.


Although the number of blacks in the samples is small, the decline in belief in police brutality between 1965 and 1967 is too large to be plausibly explained by sampling error.  1967 was the "long hot summer" of urban unrest, and the survey was taken in early August, after the Newark and Detroit riots and many smaller ones.  Although the response to those included many examples of police brutality, the riots may have made people more sympathetic to police.  Although many accounts focus exclusively on white backlash, support for a "get tough" approach is a natural reaction to disorder and crime.  


*My figure in that post has a mistake--it shows that belief that there was police brutality was a little higher in 1967 than in 1965, but it was actually a little lower.

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]