The TheGrio/KFF [Kaiser Family Foundation] Survey of Black Voters (conducted Aug. 24 to Sept. 5) asked respondents,
Thinking about police departments in your area, do you think spending on policing should be increased, kept about the same or decreased?
The answers: 17% supported decreasing funding, 48% supported keeping it about the same, and 34% supported increasing it. As I noted about a related but different survey earlier this year, of course, this doesn’t tell us what police should be doing—or, more importantly, how they should be doing it. But it does bear a bit on the “defund the police” controversy, even if “defund” is viewed merely as reducing funding, or decreasing “spending on policing” to route the savings to other programs.
Thanks to Prof. Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit) for the pointer.