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Category: Project

Description: From the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s to the Black Lives Matter (BLM) Movement in the 2010s, police brutality against Black Americans has been a central issue. In 2020, police brutality against Black Americans catalyzed BLM protests across all 50 states. Though BLM protests continue to permeate society, few scholars explore how these protests change Americans’ perceptions of the police. To investigate this phenomenon more meticulously, we administered an online survey experiment—oversampling Black American participants—to measure how protest culture, specifically BLM protests, influence civilians’ perceptions of the police. Our survey found that 1) Black American participants have a lower evaluation of police performance, but a higher evaluation of the BLM Movement than White American participants; 2) the presence of a general protest negatively impacts peoples’ perception of safety, police trustworthiness, and police performance; and 3) a BLM protest casts a stronger effect on White American participants than on Black American participants. These findings suggest that the visibility of BLM protest changes both Black and White perceptions of the police and potentially local government effectiveness. Furthermore, we argue that to understand racial differences in BLM protest and police one must position these findings within the context of Critical Race Theory.