Racial attitudes and public perceptions of police reform: An empirical analysis informed by racial threat theory

Building from racial threat theory, scholars have tested whether racial attitudes are associated with views on policing, with findings generally suggesting they are. However, the link between racial attitudes and beliefs about recently proposed policing reforms has not been fully examined. Using data from a 2023 YouGov survey of a national sample of U.S. adults (N = 1299), we analyze support for reforms targeting officer behavior, agency policy, and police abolition. Analyses assess how three racial attitudes—racial resentment, racial sympathy, and White nationalism—are related to these opinions. The findings reveal that officer-level reforms received strong support, whereas support for agency-level initiatives was more limited. Abolition received minimal endorsement. Black respondents expressed greater support for nearly all reforms than other racial groups. Multivariate analyses show that support for the three reform types are significantly associated with racial attitudes and other respondent characteristics. These findings suggest that the public may be more amenable to criminal justice reforms that aim to deter individual practitioners from bad practices than they are to sweeping systemic changes. The popularity of the bad-actor-targeted reforms may be driven less by racial attitudes than other policies are, though further research is needed to identify/falsify theorized causal relationships.