Sixty-one percent of Americans believe that race relations are generally bad in the United States — and 44 percent think that they are getting worse, according to a new survey.
In
The New York Times-CBS News poll of 1,205 adults, 65 percent of blacks and 62 percent of whites said that race relations were growing more troubling.
Forty-six percent of whites said relations were worsening, compared with 41 percent of blacks. But 42 percent of African-Americans surveyed said relations remained the same, compared with 37 percent of whites.
The survey was conducted July 14-19 and has a margin of error of 3 percentage points.
"I'm not surprised it's gotten worse under President [Barack] Obama," Elizabeth Gamble, 33, an African-American woman who works as a cook in Albany, Ga., later told the Times, "because he’s black — and so he already had that strike against him once he got into office."
In other findings:
- Seventy-five percent of Americans overall said they felt "mostly safe" about the police in their communities, compared with 81 percent for whites and 51 percent for blacks.
- Forty-two percent of African-Americans said the police made them feel "mostly anxious" in their communities.
- Ninety-two percent said they favored police wearing body cameras while on duty — and the results were 93 percent each among both races.
- Seventy-nine percent of African-Americans said they believed police were more likely to use deadly force against a black person than a white person, vs. 37 percent of whites. The overall figure was 44 percent.
- Fifty-three percent of whites said race does not affect whether the police use deadly force, compared with 16 percent of blacks and 46 percent overall.
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