It's almost certain you didn't know this if you get your news from CNN, MSNBC, or the New York Times.
Charles Fain Lehman at The Washington Free Beacon reports that Gallup polls show that over 80% of black Americans want the police to spend as much or more time in their neighborhoods as they currently do.
Asked if they would prefer police spend more, less, or the same amount of time in their neighborhoods, 61 percent of black respondents told Gallup the same, while a further 20 percent said more. Just 19 percent said less. Black respondents were more likely to want more police presence than white, Asian, and all adults overall.
The overwhelming support for current levels of policing even holds among black respondents who say they see the police often or very often. Two in three of those say they would like to see the police the same amount or more; 84 percent of black respondents who see the police "sometimes" responded that way, along with 92 percent of those who see the police rarely or never.
This is not at all consonant with what we've been hearing on progressive media outlets where the movement to defund or abolish the police has been getting a lot of airtime. Lehman reports that large majorities of Americans report trusting their local police departments and even in Minneapolis they oppose efforts to defund their police despite the views expressed by the majority white city council.
This is perhaps why Democrats, including Joe Biden, have muted their calls for defunding the police in recent days. They suddenly realized, it seems, that they were mistaken to think that parroting the demands of Black Lives Matter would ingratiate them with the black community.
There appears to be among blacks, just as among whites, a silent majority, and the silent majority of blacks is apparently wiser than the Democrats have given them credit for being.
