Does trust in the courts differ among racial and ethnic groups?
African-Americans tend to have less trust and confidence in the courts than either whites or Latinos. The survey How the Public Views the State Courts (1999) found that 25 percent of whites, 27 percent of Latinos, and 14 percent of African-Americans expressed a “great deal of trust.” Still, this is a difference in degree. The majority of African-Americans (nearly two out of three) reported holding either “a great deal” or “some” trust and confidence in the courts of their communities. Generally, African-Americans tend to have distinctly lower evaluations than do whites of the performance, trustworthiness, and fairness of courts. Latinos emerge as holding positive general assessments of the state courts, but present a mixed picture in terms of specifics: in some respects they share the more positive assessments of whites and in other respects they share the negative assessments of African-Americans when evaluating the manner in which they were treated when involved in a court case.* It
