WAY TO WRECK ANOTHER RACIST NARRATIVE:

Black Lives Matter Protests, Fatal Police Interactions, and Crime (Evelyn Skoy, SEPTEMBER 17, 2021, RESEARCH BRIEFS IN ECONOMIC POLICY NO. 267)

For this research, I combine data from Fatal Encounters, a national database of fatal encounters with law enforcement officials, with data collected from Ele​phrame​.com, a website that tracks BLM protests, to create a new state‐​by‐​month panel data set. This panel data set allows me to analyze what impact the BLM movement may have had on black fatal encounters with police. To the best of my knowledge, this is the largest and most complete data set that has been compiled on this subject. Then, using data from the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting database, I am able to examine whether the BLM movement has had any impact on the number of crimes across a variety of crime classifications.

For both of these questions, I use the number of BLM protests as a measure of intensity of the movement in a state over time. Generally, one would expect a positive correlation between the current month's protests and the number of fatal police interactions if protests are motivated by black fatal encounters with police. This paper focuses on the impact of protests on fatal interactions with police in subsequent months. As protests bring a higher level of scrutiny to police actions, they may lead to fewer fatal interactions with law enforcement in the following months. However, the added scrutiny on police may make officers more hesitant to proactively police, which could lead to emboldened criminals and higher crime rates.

I find that an increase in the number of protests within a state is associated with a decrease in the number of black fatalities from police encounters in the month immediately following the protests, yet there does not appear to be a longer‐​lasting impact on the number of fatalities. In addition, I do not find evidence that BLM protests have any measurable impact on a variety of crime measures or the number of arrests within states. This suggests that, contrary to the Ferguson effect hypothesis, increased scrutiny of police due to BLM protests did not, in fact, lead to increased crime rates.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 25, 2021 12:00 AM

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