MOSCOW, August 19 (RIA Novosti) – Only one-third of white Americans think that police response to Ferguson protests have been inappropriate, according to a survey, conducted by Pew Research Center.
The poll showed that 65 percent of African-American voters believe that the police response to the civil unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, “went too far,” while only 33 percent of whites think so.
Fully 80 percent of blacks say that the shooting in Ferguson “raises important issues about race,” compared with 37 percent of white Americans who think so.
A majority of African Americans (76 percent) have little or no confidence in the investigation of the shooting with only 33 percent of whites having the same opinion.
The national survey was conducted August 14-17 among 1,000 adults.
On August 9, a police officer shot dead Michael Brown, an 18-year-old unarmed black man, in Ferguson, a suburb of St. Louis. The incident spurred a week of mass protests in Ferguson, as well as in a number of other cities across the country. Several people were injured in clashes with police that used tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse the angry crowd.
It was also reported that Washington Post reporter Wesley Lowery and Huffington Post reporter Ryan J. Reilly were taken into custody by local police as they were working on their coverage of the demonstrations at Ferguson McDonalds. Some police officers have also been captured on video threatening to shoot one journalist and mace another.
