Correlates of peoples’ fearfulness of, and inaccuracy about, police during the COVID-19 pandemic

Purpose The George Floyd anti-police protests had substantial material and social impacts on police departments around the country in 2020, yet, little is known about the correlates of attitudes towards police during this period. Even less is known about what role key aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic context, in addition to misinformation about police, might have played. Design/methodology/approach I construct two regression models (one multinomial, one ordinary least squares) analyzing a sample of 1,401 adults in the United States, collected between September and October of 2020. I include key indicators of institutional trust (e.g. trust in news media and trust in medical authorities), of pandemic context (e.g. importance of mask wearing and of social distancing) and of misinformation about policing (e.g. accuracy in estimates about police killings). Findings Results indicate that people reporting higher trust in news media were more fearful of police mistreatment and that those who were more objectively inaccurate about the number of unarmed Black men killed by police were also more fearful of police mistreatment. These effects were found net of demographic controls (i.e. race, age, sex, SES) and net of attitudes about the COVID-19 pandemic. Additionally, trust in news media was directly associated with objective statistical inaccuracy about the racial distribution of people killed by police. Originality/value This is the first study to show that, in 2020, both fear of police mistreatment and being misinformed about police behavior were connected and appear to have been exacerbated by peoples’ trust in news media. An implication of this is that exposure to misinformation in news media may have a direct effect on negative attitudes towards police which, in turn, may increase peoples’ fear of police mistreatment.