Few Expect Ferguson Police Officer To Be Charged
Americans don’t expect the white police officer who killed black teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri to be charged with murder and oppose the U.S. Justice Department trying to prosecute him after that.
The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just 23% of American Adults believe police officer Darren Wilson should be found guilty of murder in the Brown case. That’s unchanged from mid-August just after the shooting occurred. But now 39% think the officer was acting in self-defense, up from 26% three months ago. Thirty-eight percent (38%) are still undecided, but that compares to 51% in the first survey. (To see survey question wording, click here.)
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The national telephone survey of 1,000 Adults was conducted by Rasmussen Reports on November 19-20, 2014. The margin of sampling error for the survey is +/- 2 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. Fieldwork for all Rasmussen Reports surveys is conducted by Pulse Opinion Research, LLC. See methodology.