Killings by Police Declined after Black Lives Matter Protests

[WhiskeyGrinder]

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/killings-by-police-declined-after-black-lives-matter-protests/

Since Black Lives Matter protests gained national prominence following the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., the movement has spread to hundreds of cities and towns across the United States. Now, a new study shows police homicides have significantly decreased in most cities where such protests occurred.

(snip)

“Black Lives Matter represents a trend that goes beyond the decentralization that existed within the Civil Rights Movement,” says Aldon Morris, a sociologist at Northwestern University who was not involved in the new study. “The question becomes, ‘Are Black Lives Matter protests having any real effect in terms of generating change?’ The data show very clearly that where you had Black Lives Matter protests, killing of people by the police decreased. It’s inescapable from this study that protest matters—that it can generate change.”

The study, published in February as an online preprint item on the Social Science Research Network, is the first of its kind to measure possible correlation between BLM and police homicide numbers. It found that municipalities where BLM protests have been held experienced as much as a 20 percent decrease in killings by police, resulting in an estimated 300 fewer deaths nationwide in 2014–2019. The occurrence of local protests increased the likelihood of police departments adopting body-worn cameras and community-policing initiatives, the study also found. Many cities with larger and more-frequent BLM protests experienced greater declines in police homicides.

The study involved a quantitative research technique called “difference in differences,” which mimics a controlled experiment with observational data. Difference-in-differences studies use variation in the timing and location of a “treatment variable” (such as BLM protests or police killings) to sort data into artificial control groups and treatment groups; researchers can then compare an event’s apparent effects in different settings or time periods. The new study compared police killings in cities that experienced BLM protests with those that did not.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

1. Lunchtime kick.

[BumRushDaShow]

2. I expect too

that this was due to a unique phenomena with the BLM protests that happened over the summer vs other civil rights protests over the past century - and that is that many of them were not only more wide-spread (happening in large cities, rural areas, and everywhere in between), but were often predominately white.

The media seemingly glossed over that fact, with much of the still imagery showing the usual narrow frames of cherry-picked black faces in large white crowds to make it appear that there was some sort of "diversity". But if you watched any videos of the same marches and compare to those still photos, it was pretty obvious who was in the majority of those crowds.

And I was truly amazed and heartened to see that type of response and I think that went a long way towards helping to bring about so much of the change that we have seen over the past 9 months since the George Floyd murder. I.e., people finally understanding the idiom - "Silence means consent" or perhaps the more dire version for us - "Silence = death". And people did finally step up after the blinders were ripped off to show that no , yet another black unarmed individual gunned down by LEO wasn't just a "one off" here and a "one off" there. It is part of the system and the system is stacked against us. We certainly just saw that play out in real time with the January 6th insurrection.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

3. Kick.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

4. If anyone's wondering what we can do to decrease killings by cops, here's a tactic that works!!

[Hermit-The-Prog]

5. k&r Thanks for encouraging news!

[WhiskeyGrinder]

6. Evening kick! It takes more than body cams and reform! People in the streets help decrease

killings by cops!

[leftstreet]

7. DURec

Thanks for posting this

[Klaralven]

8. America Saw a Historic Rise in Murders in 2020. Why?

For understandable reasons, “2020” and “coronavirus” are going to be synonymous in the American mind for generations to come. But there was another, quieter public-health menace that killed an alarming number of Americans last year: gun violence. As Devlin Barrett put it in the Washington Post, “The United States has experienced the largest single one-year increase in homicides since the country started keeping such records in the 20th century, according to crime data and criminologists.” We only have data for the first nine months of 2020, but according to the FBI there was a 20.9 percent increase in murders compared to the same period in 2019, a genuinely shocking increase. And exploring the reasons behind that increase can help illuminate just how insidious a problem violent crime is and how difficult it is to stem these cycles of violence once they accelerate.

At the most basic level of analysis, experts view the surge as the result of a worst-case confluence of forces — the stresses of a pandemic and the intensity of the protests that followed the killing of George Floyd — that pushed already-frayed neighborhoods into spirals of violence. That can partly explain why the bloodshed wasn’t evenly distributed. Some places remained as peaceful as ever. In others, the rise in murders was even more dramatic than it was nationally. Chicago saw a 37 percent year-over-year increase between the first halves of 2019 and 2020. And in New York City, by December 20, 2020, there had been a 40 percent increase over the 2019 numbers.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/02/america-saw-a-historic-rise-in-murders-in-2020-why.html

Beware the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.

[Solly Mack]

9. K&R