Poll: Americans agree with Ferguson grand jury; disagree with NYC one
A new poll shows considerably more unhappiness with the lack of an indictment in Garner's case than in the one in Ferguson. And, perhaps most important as far as its impact goes, that unhappiness is significantly less connected to a person's race.
The Selzer and Company poll for Bloomberg News finds that 60 percent of Americans disagree with the lack of an indictment against officer Daniel Pantaleo, whose chokehold apparently led to Garner's death in July. For comparison's sake, just 36 percent say they disagree with the lack of an indictment against officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson.
So basically, Americans as a whole favor no indictment in Ferguson. In Garner's case, they overwhelmingly think there should have been one. And in fact, just one-quarter of Americans agree with the grand jury's decision not to indict.
The differences in the two cases are almost completely because of whites.
In both cases, nine in 10 African Americans say they disagree with the decision. Although just 25 percent of whites disagree with the decision in Ferguson, a majority (52 percent) disagree with the decision in Garner's case.
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We've written before about why the Garner case hasn't split the country along racial and party lines like Ferguson has. Basically, the political and racial disagreement in Ferguson was all about the still-unclear sequence of events that preceded the death of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown; it actually had little to do with politics, per se. In the Garner case, there is a video, leading to less debate about the particulars of precisely what happened.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2014/12/08/why-eric-garner-is-the-turning-point-ferguson-never-was/
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