US Muslims five times more likely to face police harassment due to their religion, study shows

Muslims are five times more likely to experience police harassment because of their religion compared to those of other faiths, a study by Rice University shows.

More specifically, Muslim adults who identify as Black, Middle Eastern, Arab or North African are more likely than Muslims who identify as white to report that they have been harassed by the police because of their religion, according to the study published in the Society for the Study of Social Problems.

“It is worth noting that the overall rate among US adults was estimated at 3.8 percent, so Muslim individuals are about five times as likely to say they have been harassed by the police due to their religion,” the report states.

The data for this study came from the survey component of the 2019 Experiences with Religious Discrimination Study (ERDS), a project examining individuals’ experiences with interpersonal hostility, discrimination, and victimisation due to their religion.

In July, the Arab American Action Network (AAAN) obtained 235 “Suspicious Activity Reports” (SARs) through the Freedom of Information Act.

The reports were made between 2016 and 2020 by the Chicago Police Department and Illinois State Police. In the reports, they found that over 50 percent of “suspects” reported to the police, primarily for doing mundane things like texting or taking photos, were described as people of Arab descent in Chicago.

“Sociologists understand how race impacts experiences with police. However, there is less work examining how religion specifically shapes people’s experiences with police,” said Jauhara Ferguson, the lead author of the study and a PhD student in sociology at Rice University.

“We believe it’s an important topic to explore, and it can help us understand the connections between religion and race in experiences with police harassment”, said lead author of the study at Rice University.