A study titled "Black Lives Matter's Effect on Police Lethal Use-of-Force" was recently published by Travis Campbell, an economist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and it shows that there has been a decline in police homicides in cities where Black Lives Matter protests were held.
The Black Lives Matter movement was started when Oakland, CA-based activist Alicia Garza posted a message of protest when George Zimmerman was acquitted of killing 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in 2013, which read, "I continue to be surprised at how little Black lives matter... Our lives matter." Fellow Oakland-based community organizer Patrisse Cullors then began sharing Garza's message along with the #blacklives matter hashtag. The movement gained momentum following the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., and it has continued to grow larger in recent years, with protests popping up around the world after George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis in 2020.
The new study is the first of its kind to measure a possible correlation between BLM and police homicide numbers. It showed that cities that had BLM protests experienced a 20 percent decrease in killings by police and an estimated 300 fewer deaths nationwide in 2014–2019. The protests also showed police departments in the cities with protests are more likely to adopt body-worn cameras and community-policing initiatives.
The study’s author, Travis Campbell, pointed out that “It’s really difficult to measure Black Lives Matter protests and lethal use of force by the police" due to the government not tracking police officers' lethal use of force. Efforts have been made to fill the void by the media and grassroots organizations via the Freedom of Information Act requests and crowdsourcing. After using several different techniques to measure the relationship between protests and police homicides, Campbell consistently found similar results.
Source: Scientific American
