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A damning new survey from the Harvard Institute of Politics shows the extent of mistrust of authorities by young people in the U.S.
Close to 50 percent of young people in the United States believe the justice system is racially and ethnically biased, while 80 percent said racial inequality could be reduced if cameras were placed on police, who between 2003 and 2009 arbitrarily killed close to 3,000 people during arrests.
Released Wednesday, the survey shockingly found that 49 percent of the 3,034 people polled aged 18 to 19 have little or no confidence in police across the U.S. This went up to 66 percent among African-Americans, and 53 percent among Hispanics.
RELATED: Baltimore Uprising
The survey was released as Baltimore slowly returns to normality after intense protests this week following the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old Black man, who suffered a fatal spinal injury while in police custody.
Eighty percent of those surveyed said equipping police officers with body cameras could help reduce racial inequalities within the justice system.
The Harvard study also found there is a racial divide among the youth regarding their view of the Black Lives Matter movement, which has arisen in response to high-profile incidents of police brutality, particularly against minorities.
About 37 percent of white people support the movement, while 81 percent of African-Americans and 59 percent of Hispanics are in favor of it, the survey revealed.
The survey comes a day after the Los Angeles Police Commission approved rules governing the widespread use of body cameras in the nation's second largest city.
Government Admits to 3,000 Police Arrest-Related Homicides
Between 2003 and 2009, 4,813 persons died during or shortly after law enforcement personnel tried to arrest or restrain them, the Bureau of Justice Statistics said in a report that was released in 2011, which has not been updated.
The BJS, an arm of the Department of Justice, admitted that the figures are highly under-reported, as there are over 18,000 police departments and bodies across the United States, which, they added, do not inform the federal government of their respective statistics.
“About 60 percent of arrest-related deaths (2,931) were classified as homicides by law enforcement personnel and 40 percent (1,882) were attributed to other manners of death,” the BJS said.
The bureau added that suicide and death by intoxication each accounted for about 11 percent of all reported arrest-related deaths, while accidental injury for 6 percent and natural causes for 5 percent. The government office said that, “A definitive manner of death was unknown for about six percent of deaths.”
In March, British newspaper The Guardian published a U.S. report saying an average of 545 people killed per year during 10 years by local and state law enforcement officers went uncounted in the crime statistics. The study revealed that an average of 928 people were killed by police annually over eight recent years, compared to 383 in published FBI data.
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