Public trust in law enforcement in the United States has recovered somewhat from the lows that followed George Floyd’s 2020 murder, but it remains fragile, deeply split by race and politics, and shaped by a federal government that has recently stepped back from policing oversight. Gallup’s 2024 confidence survey found 51% of Americans expressing “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the police, up eight points from the record low of 43% in 2023 but still well below the 64% peak set in 2004.1Gallup. Confidence in Institutions Mostly Flat; Police Up At the same time, Gallup’s December 2025 honesty-and-ethics poll showed officers falling back to a record low rating, dropping seven percentage points in a single year, the steepest decline of any profession measured.2Gallup. Nurses Continue to Lead Honesty and Ethics Ratings Americans, in other words, are warming back up to the institution while growing colder on the people inside it.
That contradiction captures the state of the issue. The headline numbers are improving. The underlying drivers of distrust are not.
What Has Driven the Loss of Trust
The pattern researchers describe is cumulative. High-profile deaths at the hands of police — Michael Brown in Ferguson in 2014, Freddie Gray in Baltimore in 2015, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd in 2020 — have each produced measurable drops in public confidence.3FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin. Intertwining Ethics and Confidence to Regain and Sustain Trust Mapping Police Violence estimated that police killed at least 1,314 people in 2025, a 5% decrease from the prior year but part of a decade-long pattern in which Black, Hispanic, Native American, and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander people are killed at disproportionately high rates.4Mapping Police Violence. Year-End Report 2025
The NAACP Legal Defense Fund, in an analysis authored by Dr. Phillip Atiba Goff, argued that the real problem is not any single incident but “unaddressed misconduct and constitutional violations — again and again over decades.” Trust erodes, the LDF contends, when past injuries go unacknowledged, when departments attribute racial disparities solely to crime demographics, and when doctrines like qualified immunity shield officers from consequences.5NAACP Legal Defense Fund. The Truth About Trust and Police
An FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin article added several institutional forces to that list: a general climate of distrust in public institutions, increased public incivility, a polarizing press, and “de-policing,” the phenomenon of officers intentionally disengaging because of confusion about shifting rules or resentment of new oversight.3FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin. Intertwining Ethics and Confidence to Regain and Sustain Trust
The Racial Divide
Race remains the strongest predictor of how Americans view the police, and the gap has barely moved in half a century. A Cato Institute national survey found 68% of white Americans held a favorable view of police, compared with 59% of Hispanic Americans and 40% of African Americans — figures that have changed little since 1970.6Cato Institute. Policing in America: Understanding Public Attitudes Toward the Police Only 31% of African Americans said they were confident local police treat all racial groups equally, compared with 64% of white Americans. Thirty-three percent of Black respondents expected to be treated worse than other people during a police encounter, more than five times the rate among white respondents.
These perceptions are rooted in lived experience. Seventeen percent of Black Americans in the Cato survey said they had been stopped by police three or more times in the past five years, compared with 8% of white Americans. Higher-income Black Americans were stopped at roughly 1.5 times the rate of higher-income white Americans, which undercuts any purely economic explanation. Thirty-nine percent of African Americans said they personally knew someone who had been physically mistreated by police.
Council on Criminal Justice data reinforces the picture. Two-thirds of the American public overall believe police treat Black people less fairly than white people, a view shared by 91% of Black Americans, 71% of Hispanic Americans, and 58% of white Americans.7Council on Criminal Justice. Public Perceptions of the Police At the same time, 52% of Black residents in high-poverty communities said they wanted police to spend more time in their neighborhoods, compared with 6% who wanted less. The desire is for better policing, not less of it.
There has been movement at the margins. Gallup’s 2024 measure of confidence in local police reached 64% among Black adults, the highest figure in the four years the question had been tracked.8Gallup. Racial Divide on Policing Narrows Years After Floyd Death But Pew Research Center reported in May 2025 that 54% of Americans believed the relationship between Black people and the police was “about the same” as before Floyd’s death, and 72% said the increased focus on racial inequality that followed had not produced changes that improved Black Americans’ lives.9Pew Research Center. Police
The Partisan Divide
The gap between Republicans and Democrats on policing has grown from a 9-point difference in 2013 to a 54-point gap, according to data presented at a Council on Criminal Justice event.7Council on Criminal Justice. Public Perceptions of the Police The Cato survey found 81% of Republicans viewed police favorably, compared with 59% of Democrats. Seventy-eight percent of Republicans believed officers are held accountable for misconduct; 59% of Democrats said they are not.
The split extends to policy. Seventy-eight percent of Democrats in a Council on Criminal Justice survey supported redirecting police funding to social programs, compared with 5% of Republicans. Nearly nine in ten Democrats favored major changes to policing, compared with 14% of Republicans. The divide persists even within racial groups: a Pew Research survey found 76% of white Republicans said police treat racial groups equally, compared with 27% of white Democrats.10Pew Research Center. Republicans More Likely Than Democrats to Have Confidence in Police
Experts interviewed by the Council on Criminal Justice attributed much of the widening to elected officials sending partisan signals that shape their constituents’ views. Cato analysts found that respect for authority, an ideological trait more common among conservatives, was a stronger predictor of favorable attitudes toward police than party affiliation alone.
What the Loss of Trust Actually Costs
When trust breaks down, so does the cooperation police rely on to solve crimes. A 2025 study by Jesse Bruhn and colleagues, published as an NBER working paper, used acoustic gunshot detection systems in 13 major U.S. cities to separate actual gunfire from the public’s willingness to report it. After George Floyd’s murder, the researchers found a sharp rise in gunshots while the ratio of 911 calls to detected shots fell by more than 50%. The decline was “large, persistent and widespread,” lasting through the end of 2020 and cutting across racial groups.11Brown University Population Studies and Training Center. Police Violence and Public Trust National Crime Victimization Survey data confirmed that crime victims in that period cited “mistrust of law enforcement and fear of police harassment” as reasons for not reporting.
The study concluded that when police violence degrades citizen trust, the result is “reduced police efficacy, increased crime, and additional threats to public safety.” Dr. Goff put it plainly: “No one will provide a tip or report a neighbor’s wrongdoing if they do not trust the officers who patrol their community.”5NAACP Legal Defense Fund. The Truth About Trust and Police
The Cato survey quantified the cooperation gap directly: 78% of white Americans said they would “definitely” report a violent crime they witnessed, compared with 54% of African Americans and 57% of Hispanic Americans.6Cato Institute. Policing in America: Understanding Public Attitudes Toward the Police
Reforms After Floyd and What Stuck
Within a year of George Floyd’s murder on May 25, 2020, at least 30 states and the District of Columbia enacted legislative policing reforms. Twenty-five states addressed use of force, duty to intervene, or officer decertification. Nine states and D.C. enacted total bans on police chokeholds. Fourteen states established or strengthened decertification processes to prevent officers fired for misconduct from simply joining another department. Massachusetts and Hawaii created centralized decertification bodies for the first time.12Brennan Center for Justice. State Policing Reforms Since George Floyd’s Murder
At the local level, cities launched non-police crisis response teams for behavioral health calls, reduced police presence in schools, and in New York City’s case, ended qualified immunity for officers at the municipal level. The Department of Justice under the Biden administration opened pattern-or-practice investigations into Minneapolis and Louisville and secured federal civil rights indictments against the four officers involved in Floyd’s death.
Policy convergence among large departments has been substantial. Data compiled by the Stanford Center for Racial Justice shows chokehold bans went from 22% of departments in 2015–2016 to 92%, and policies requiring officers to intervene against a colleague’s excessive force went from 29% to 95%.13Stanford Center for Racial Justice. Police Use of Force Policies Forty-eight percent of the 100 largest cities have adopted a “necessary” standard for force, stricter than the “objectively reasonable” standard the Supreme Court established in Graham v. Connor.
Other pieces of the reform agenda have stalled or reversed. Calls to “defund the police” have largely given way to budget increases. The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act passed the House in 2020 but never advanced in the Senate. Bills reintroduced in 2025, including the Ending Qualified Immunity Act sponsored by Representative Ayanna Pressley and Senator Edward Markey, face long odds under Republican-controlled chambers.14Office of Congresswoman Pressley. Pressley Reintroduces Suite of Bills to Transform Criminal Legal System The Supreme Court has rejected dozens of qualified immunity cases since 2020.15NBC News. Five Years After George Floyd’s Death, Calls to Reform Qualified Immunity Mostly Stalled
Barnes v. Felix and the Totality of Circumstances
One judicial development worth understanding arrived in May 2025. In Barnes v. Felix, the Supreme Court unanimously rejected the Fifth Circuit’s “moment of threat” doctrine, which had limited the use-of-force analysis to the two seconds before Officer Roberto Felix Jr. shot and killed Ashtian Barnes during a 2016 traffic stop.16Justia. Barnes v. Felix, 605 U.S. ___ (2025)
Writing for the Court, Justice Kagan held that courts assessing whether an officer’s use of force was reasonable must consider the “totality of the circumstances,” including facts and events leading up to the moment force was used. “No rule that precludes consideration of prior events in assessing a police shooting is reconcilable with the fact-dependent and context-sensitive approach we have prescribed,” the Court wrote.17Harvard Law Review. Barnes v. Felix Lower courts can no longer isolate the final seconds of a use-of-force encounter from its broader context: the reasons for the stop, the officer’s earlier conduct, and how the situation escalated.
The Court did not decide whether an officer’s own creation of a dangerous situation can factor into reasonableness, leaving that question for future cases. The FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin noted the ruling makes documentation of all facts preceding a use of force significantly more important for officers and departments, because those details are now admissible in the reasonableness analysis.18FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin. Legal Spotlight: Barnes v. Felix and Use of Force Cases
The Federal Retreat From Oversight
The most significant policy shift affecting police accountability in recent years has been the federal government’s withdrawal from oversight of local departments. On May 21, 2025, the Department of Justice announced it was dismissing lawsuits, closing investigations, and retracting findings of constitutional violations against eight law enforcement agencies, including those in Minneapolis, Louisville, Phoenix, Trenton, Memphis, Mount Vernon, Oklahoma City, and the Louisiana State Police.19U.S. Department of Justice. DOJ Civil Rights Division Dismisses Biden-Era Police Investigations Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon characterized the prior administration’s consent decrees as “expensive micromanagement” and said the DOJ had “erred” by “wrongly equating statistical disparities with intentional discrimination.”20The Marshall Project. Trump DOJ Ends Police Reform Investigations
Days earlier, on April 28, 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14288, “Strengthening and Unleashing America’s Law Enforcement to Pursue Criminals and Protect Innocent Citizens.” The order directed the Attorney General to review all ongoing federal consent decrees and move to modify or terminate those that “unduly impede the performance of law enforcement functions.” It also created a mechanism to provide legal resources and indemnification to officers who incur liabilities during official duties, directed the Defense Department to increase the provision of surplus military equipment to local agencies, and instructed federal prosecutors to take over cases, primarily involving firearms and drugs, that local authorities had declined to pursue.21The White House. Executive Order: Strengthening and Unleashing America’s Law Enforcement
What Happens When Oversight Ends
Officials in Minneapolis, Louisville, and Phoenix pledged to continue implementing reforms voluntarily after the DOJ pulled out. A June 2026 ACLU report assessed how those efforts are going. The review, based on police use-of-force reports from late 2024 through early 2025, found that while Louisville and Minneapolis had adopted local versions of their reform agreements and hired independent monitors, officers in both cities continued to engage in the behaviors that had attracted federal scrutiny: misuse of Tasers, failures to properly review use-of-force incidents, and excessive force against people in mental health crises.22MPR News. ProPublica: Trump’s DOJ Police Reform New Report
Louisville faced particular scrutiny following two fatal police shootings of individuals experiencing mental health crises in 2026. Mayor Craig Greenberg said the city was “moving as rapidly” as possible to integrate behavioral health experts into crisis response, but the ACLU’s Jenn Rolnick Borchetta said the persistence of these problems suggests departments “are not doing enough to improve that conduct.”
Newark, New Jersey, offers a contrasting case. In November 2025, a federal judge terminated the city’s nine-year consent decree after auditors found the Newark Police Division had achieved at least 95% compliance across all ten priority areas.23New Jersey Institute for Social Justice. Newark Consent Decree Even there, a January 2026 fatal shooting by an officer who had accumulated 25 use-of-force incidents since joining the department in 2022 raised questions about whether sustained compliance can survive without external enforcement.
What the Research Says Builds Trust
Decades of work has identified a framework that reliably improves community trust: procedural justice, defined by four principles. Officers should treat people with dignity and respect, give them a voice during encounters, make decisions neutrally, and convey trustworthy motives. Research synthesized by Yale Law School’s Tom Tyler and Tracey Meares has found that people’s assessments of police legitimacy are driven more by the perceived fairness of an encounter than by its outcome.24Yale Law School. Procedural Justice and Police Legitimacy
When officers follow these principles, communities are more likely to comply with the law, cooperate with investigations, and accept police authority — effects that hold up more consistently than traditional deterrence-based approaches. A peer-reviewed study of a one-day procedural justice training in the Chicago Police Department found lasting improvements in officers’ support for providing voice, dignity, and neutrality, though gains in officers’ attitudes toward trust faded over time.25COPS Office, U.S. Department of Justice. Procedural Justice and Police Legitimacy Cities including Stockton, Salinas, and Oakland have tried to institutionalize these principles by incorporating them into officer evaluations and state certification standards.26Bureau of Justice Assistance. Procedural Justice and Police Legitimacy
The Yale researchers point out an uncomfortable finding: despite dramatic declines in violent crime and increased police professionalism since the 1990s, public trust has remained stagnant, which suggests that performance-based metrics alone cannot build legitimacy. The shift the research points toward is cultural, from what Tyler and others describe as a “warrior” mindset to a “guardian” orientation, a change harder to mandate and slower to achieve than any single policy reform.
Alternative Crisis Response
One concrete innovation to emerge from the trust crisis is the non-police crisis response model. The oldest and best-documented example is CAHOOTS (Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets), which has operated in Eugene, Oregon, since 1989. Run by the nonprofit White Bird Clinic, CAHOOTS dispatches two-person teams, a medic and a mental health crisis worker, to non-criminal behavioral health calls routed through the city’s 911 system.
In 2019, CAHOOTS teams responded to approximately 24,000 calls, roughly 20% of all calls directed to Eugene’s public safety communications center. Police backup was requested on only 150 to 311 of those calls, between 0.6% and 1.3%.27Vera Institute of Justice. CAHOOTS28Albany Law School Government Law Center. Alternatives to Police as First Responders The Eugene Police Department’s crime analysis unit estimated CAHOOTS diverted 5% to 8% of 911 calls, saving the department roughly $1.23 million annually.29Health Affairs. CAHOOTS: A Model for Prehospital Mental Health Crisis Intervention No staff member has suffered a major injury in over 30 years of operation.
Eugene Police Chief Chris Skinner said the presence of a mental health worker and an EMT, rather than armed officers, “has a tendency to almost immediately deescalate a situation.” Program leaders have acknowledged that CAHOOTS operates in a predominantly white community and that adapting the model to cities with deeper histories of police-community tension involves additional challenges.
Body Cameras: The Transparency Tool That Hasn’t Closed the Gap
Body-worn cameras became the signature transparency reform of the past decade, with nearly half of the country’s roughly 12,000 local police departments using them by 2016, including 70% of agencies with more than 500 officers.30American Bar Association. Body-Worn Cameras Whether they build trust is another question. A National Institute of Justice review of 70 studies, including a 2020 meta-analysis, rated the overall impact of body-worn cameras on use of force, citizen complaints, and other metrics as “No Effects.”31National Institute of Justice. Research on Body-Worn Cameras and Law Enforcement An Urban Institute evaluation found that some officers activated their cameras in fewer than 2% of incidents, and few community members were aware they were being recorded because policies often did not require officers to disclose it.32Urban Institute. Three Ways Police Can Use Body Cameras to Build Community Trust The American Bar Association concluded that cameras “cannot, by themselves, ensure accountability.”
The Staffing Crisis Inside the Profession
The erosion of trust has reshaped law enforcement from within. A Police Executive Research Forum survey found that as of January 2025, overall sworn staffing levels remained 5.2% below January 2020 levels. Agencies with 250 or more officers were still down 6% from pre-2020 figures.33Police Executive Research Forum. Staffing Trends July 2025 Resignations, while declining from their 2021–2022 peak, remained 18.4% above 2019 levels in 2024.
A Police1 survey of 2,833 officers found 82% reported working in understaffed agencies, and 40% said they had experienced a “near miss” at work due to fatigue and stress.34Police1. The Cost of Service: How Understaffing and Stress Are Impacting Police Wellness Sixteen percent reported experiencing thoughts of suicide within the past year, and 79% identified significant stigma around seeking mental health support within their agencies. “Negativity from the media and the general public” was cited as one of the least satisfying aspects of the job. The International Association of Chiefs of Police labeled the situation a “continuing crisis” in a 2024 survey of over 1,100 agencies.35International Association of Chiefs of Police. The State of Recruitment and Retention: A Continuing Crisis for Police
The staffing problem feeds back into the trust problem. Understaffed, overworked departments have less bandwidth for the kind of community engagement procedural justice research says works, and tired officers are more likely to make the kinds of split-second decisions that end up in viral video.
Where This Leaves Public Trust
Confidence has rebounded from its post-Floyd low. The racial gap in perceptions of local police has narrowed. Individual departments have adopted reform policies, from chokehold bans to duty-to-intervene requirements, at rates that would have been unimaginable a decade ago. At the same time, the federal government has withdrawn from oversight, qualified immunity remains intact, honesty-and-ethics ratings for police have hit new lows, and the profession itself is losing personnel faster than it can replace them.
A Congressional Research Service report identified a structural obstacle underlying all of these tensions: federalism limits Congress’s direct control over state and local police, and the federal government’s primary leverage, attaching conditions to grants and conducting pattern-or-practice investigations, depends on political will that shifts with each administration.36Congressional Research Service. Public Trust and Law Enforcement The burden of sustaining reform now falls disproportionately on local governments, many of which lack the resources or political incentive to maintain compliance without outside pressure. The early returns from Louisville and Minneapolis have begun to illustrate what that looks like in practice.