US Study: Black, MENA Muslims Are More Likely To Report Police Harassment

Rabat – A new study by sociologists from Rice University and West Virginia University found that the interaction of religion and race is relevant to understand how the American police are perceived by communities such as the Black and MENA Muslims.

The study titled, “Religion, Race, and Perceptions of Police Harassment,” was published in the July edition of the Social Problems journal. It noted that roughly 20% of Muslims report having been harassed by the police at some point because of their religion, which is fourfold the rate reported by people of other faiths.

The study addresses the knowledge gap on how religion shapes people’s experiences with the police, said Jauhara Ferguson, the research’s lead author and a Ph.D. student in sociology at Rice

“We find that, independent of religion, adults identifying as Black or as MENA [Middle Eastern-Arab-North African] are significantly more likely to report religion-based police harassment when compared to White individuals, a finding that is explained by these individuals’ greater reports of race-based police harassment,” the researchers explained in the abstract of their paper.

They added, “Exposure to police harassment based on race is more likely to make an individual perceive harassment based on their religion as well.”

Funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, the study’s results, as Elaine Howard Ecklund, the Herbert Autrey Chair in Social Sciences at Rice, said, “reveal the consequential and overlapping nature of racial and religious identities” in the American context.

As black and MENA-descent Muslims living in the States consider themselves to be subject to police harassment due to their religion or in other terms being subject to Islamophobia, Muslim organizations in the US have on several occasions called for the end of religion-based discrimination and violence.

In January, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) unveiled that 35 American charitable institutions and foundations financed 26 Islamophobic groups between 2017 and 2019 to spread disinformation about Islam and Muslims. A total budget of $105 million was dedicated to such campaigns, leading to “fear, hatred, and prejudice” against the Abrahamic religion and its followers, CAIR said.

Inciting Islamophobia in public discourse is increasingly becoming a prominent feature of European politics, as recently witnessed in the latest presidential elections in France.

In the UK, a recent survey carried out by the Muslim Engagement and Development group and the Muslim Census initiative found that 42% of mosques and Islamic organizations experienced islamophobic attacks in the past three years.