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REPRINTED FROM THENEXTMAYOR.COMMay 11, 2007 press release, (submitted via e-mail) |
Economy League of Greater Philadelphia
Temple University Institute for Public Affairs
May 11, 2007 – Philadelphia, PA – Black and white Philadelphians disagree about the “stop and frisk” policy debated fiercely by the mayoral candidates in recent days, according to a poll of the Philadelphia electorate sponsored by the Economy League of Greater Philadelphia and conducted by Temple University’s Institute for Public Affairs. The debate about former City Councilman Michael Nutter’s proposal that Philadelphia police be authorized to stop and search people they suspect of carrying an illegal gun has at times taken on racial overtones, as U.S. Rep. Chaka Fattah and State Rep. Dwight Evans have said that in practice the policy might be used to target African Americans unfairly, raising the specter of racial profiling. That concern is reflected in racial differences of opinion about policies to reduce violent crime.
The Philadelphia electorate on the whole supports the “stop and frisk” proposal. According to the Economy League’s Priorities and Performance Poll, 60 percent of Philadelphians favor “a policy instructing the police in your neighborhood to stop and search people they suspect are carrying an illegal gun.” Blacks are considerably less supportive than whites, however. Two thirds of whites favor the policy; just a bare majority of blacks, 52 percent, favor it. Among registered Democrats the difference is slightly larger: 70 percent of white Democrats and 52 percent of black Democrats favor the policy.
“African Americans’ ambivalence to-ward ‘stop and frisk’ stands out in comparison to the community’s strong support for other measures that have been proposed to contend with violent crime in Philadelphia,” according to Michael G. Hagen, Associate Professor and Director of the Institute for Public Affairs at Temple University. “Blacks are much more supportive of other measures, and more supportive than whites.”
Seventy-five percent of blacks say they would be willing, for example, to pay higher city taxes for “cameras to monitor city streets to help the police catch criminals,” compared to 61 percent of whites. A great majority of African-American residents also favor having more of the city’s police assigned to the public schools, to patrol their own neighborhood, or to patrol high-crime neighborhoods, and blacks are even more supportive of these ideas than whites.
Black Philadelphians are more ambivalent than white Philadelphians about “stop and frisk” because they are more skeptical about the city’s police. Compared to whites, blacks are much less satisfied with police protection in Philadelphia and less likely to be willing to pay higher taxes for more police. The differences in opinions about the police do not simply reflect differences in feel-ings about crime. “Blacks in Philadel-phia are more likely than whites to feel unsafe, in their neighborhoods and in their homes,” said Hagen, “but even when we compare only people who feel unsafe, blacks are much less satisfied than whites with police protection.”
The Priorities and Performance Poll is a project of the Economy League’s IssuesPhiladelphia initiative. Is-suesPhiladelphia seeks to focus government on efficiently and effectively providing the results that matter to city residents and to help Philadelphians understand how decisions are made and how individuals’ voices can be heard. The IssuesPhiladelphia.org website features the poll’s full results (including the data set and ques-tionnaire), research on governance best practices, facts and analysis of the Philadelphia city budget, and links to important resources. IssuesPhiladelphia is funded by the William Penn Foundation and by Economy League members.
For this IssuesPHL Poll, a scientifically selected representative sample of 802 Philadelphians age 18 or older were interviewed by telephone between February 16 and 26, 2007. Within each household, a respondent was chosen according to a random-selection method. Once the interviewing was complete, the data were weighted to correct for unequal selection probabilities—in this case, to take into account differences in the number of telephone lines in different households—and unequal response probabilities. Post-stratification weights were calculated, using a sample balancing procedure, to ensure that the sample matches the adult population of Philadelphia in terms of age, education, income, race, and sex, as estimated in the U.S. Census. With a sample of this size, the overall margin of error attributable to sampling is 3.5 percentage points. The sampling error for subgroups is larger.
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