Protests under the banner of "Black Lives Matter" surged in American cities starting in 2013. This study creates a new dataset tracking such protests from 2014-2015 and finds they are significantly more likely to occur where police have killed more Black residents previously.
📊 Data & Methods
Researchers analyzed newly compiled data on BLM protests during this period, examining correlations between protest frequency and historical local homicide rates by police against Black individuals.
🔍 Key Finding
Contrary to intuition, higher numbers of recent, unexplained Black deaths at the hands of police in a locality predict greater subsequent likelihood of BLM-related public demonstrations.
📖 Why It Matters
This discovery underscores how visceral encounters with state violence can catalyze social movements. The findings illuminate dynamics connecting localized carceral realities to national political engagement campaigns.
| Black Lives Matter: Evidence that Police-Caused Deaths Predict Protest Activity was authored by Kris-Stella Trump, Vanessa Williamson and Katherine Levine Einstein. It was published by Cambridge in POP in 2018. |
