It would be difficult to cast more extreme spokespersons for the competing viewpoints. It would also be difficult to find an issue about which whites and minorities more fundamentally disagree. The divide, reflected most dramatically in the unforgettable split-screen response to the acquittal of O.J. Simpson, is confirmed every time a poll is taken on attitudes toward the criminal justice system. By contrast, only 24 percent of whites considered police brutality against minorities to be widespread. These concerns are not new.
Negroes firmly believe that police brutality and harassment occur repeatedly in Negro neighborhoods.
This belief is unquestionably one of the major reasons for intense Negro resentment against the police. Physical abuse is only one source of aggravation in the ghetto. In nearly every city surveyed, the Commission heard complaints of dispersal of social street gatherings and the stopping of Negroes on foot or in cars without objective basis. . . . One such practice utilizes a roving task force which moves into high-crime districts without prior notice and conducts intensive, often indiscriminate, street stops and searches. . . . Police administrators, pressed by public concern about crime, have instituted such patrol practices often without weighing their tension-creating effects and the resulting relationship to civil disorder.