BLM Protests & Police Shootings
A new study by Travis Campbell at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst found that police homicides decrease 15-20% over a five year period following BLM protests, and that the effect ”is most prominent when protests are large or frequent.” Over the ensuing five year period, this amounted to approximately 300 fewer deaths.
The full paper can be found here, but the abstract is as follows:
The gap in lethal use-of-force between places with and without protests widens over these subsequent years and is most prominent when protests are large or frequent. This result holds for alternative specifications, estimators, police homicide datasets, and population screens; however, it does not hold if lethal use-of-force is normalized by violent crime or arrests. Protests also influence local police agencies, which may explain the reduction. Agencies with local protests become more likely to obtain body-cameras, expand community policing, receive a larger operating budget, and reduce the number of property crime-related arrests, but forego some black officer employment and college education requirements.
The study is amazing and it’s findings, but it begs the question that is much harder to answer… Why? What is the causal link between these protests and a reduction in police shootings? While the causal chain of events that ultimately ends in a police officer using lethal force are undoubtedly complicated, the protests have heightened awareness about systemic racism in policing. Which in turn creates hesitation and a critical space for thoughtful assessments. It is in this critical space that life and death decisions are made.
At Project Hummingbird, we believe that, with some extremely rare exceptions, people who use deadly force in the line of duty do so only if they believe, fully in that moment, that the person poses a grave threat to themselves or another person. Sometimes they are right, but sometimes they are not. No doubt, race plays a role in split second decisions about who is dangerous, threatening, or aggressive. White cops need this training, but so do Black cops, and mall cops, and security guards, and executive protection agents. We can not solve the problem that people often make poor decisions and inaccurate judgements out of fear, but we can help overrule those instincts by using information to better assess who poses a threat to life.
Countless examples have shown that we can not solely rely on our instincts to determine who deserves to die. We need to learn to rely on our words, and our reasoning, prior to taking a human life. Yes, of course there are life and death situations in which officers are fighting for their lives, but that is not the case in every shooting. A human life is important enough to know the difference.
The BLM protests and subsequent national conversation around race has made it harder for police to deny the impact of race on making split second decisions, and perhaps paradoxically, easier for good cops of all ethnicity to be absolutely sure they were in danger before using violence of any kind. When police are more aware of their biases, they can also be more confident in their decisions.
We owe it to the officers in the line of duty and the communities they serve to continue the discourse about race and its impact on police shootings. Moreover, we need more studies like Mr. Campbell’s who can add some quantifiable data to what many communities of color already know to be true- that they have higher chances of an encounter with law enforcement, that those encounters are more likely to lead to arrest and incarceration, and that in instances of deadly force they are killed at disproportionately high rates.
