Link. Didn't see a thread.
Sixty-nine percent of Americans say race relations are generally bad, one of the highest levels of discord since the 1992 riots in Los Angeles during the Rodney King case, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.
The poll, conducted from Friday, the day after the killing of five Dallas police officers, until Tuesday, found that six in 10 Americans say race relations were growing worse, up from 38 percent a year ago.
Relations between black Americans and the police have become so brittle that more than half of black people say they were not surprised by the attack that killed five police officers and wounded nine others in Dallas last week. Nearly half of white Americans say that they, too, were unsurprised by the episode, the survey found.
Asked whether the police in most communities are more likely to use deadly force against a black person than a white person, three-quarters of African-Americans answered yes, and only about half as many white people agree. Fifty-six percent of whites said that the race of the suspect made no difference in the use of force; only 18 percent of black Americans said so.
When asked to rate the job their local police department was doing, four in five whites said excellent or good; a majority of blacks answered fair or poor. More than two-fifths of black people say the police in their communities make them feel more anxious than safe. By wide margins, whites and Hispanics say the police make them feel safer.
Black and white opinion is sharply divided on the aims and the approach of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Seventy percent of African-Americans are sympathetic to the movement, compared with only 37 percent of whites. Among all Americans, 41 percent agree with the movement, 25 percent disagree and 29 percent do not have an opinion either way.
The nationwide Times/CBS News Poll was conducted July 8 to 12 on cellphones and landlines with 1,600 adults, including 171 black respondents and 1,207 whites. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus three percentage points for all adults, three points for whites and nine points for blacks.