How Representative of the Protest Movement Against Police Violence Are Opportunistic People Looking to Commit Crime?: Racial Differences in Public Opinion

Abstract

The largest protests in U.S. history occurred during summer 2020. Despite being overwhelmingly peaceful, some property damage, looting, and violence transpired. This study used Wave 68 of the American Trends Panel, collected by the Pew Research Center 10 days after Minneapolis police murdered George Floyd, to test whether: (1) Black people are less likely than white people to oppose Black Lives Matter (BLM); (2) compared to white people, Black people perceive individuals who use protests as a pretext for committing crime to comprise a smaller proportion of the overall protest movement; and (3) opposition to BLM mediates some or all of the relationship between race and perceptions of the degree to which people who use protests as a pretext to commit crime comprise the overall protest movement. Results from generalized ordered logistic regression analyses confirmed that, compared to white people, Black people were less likely to oppose BLM and perceived the summer 2020 protest movement to have contained fewer opportunistic individuals looking to commit crime. Pathway analysis results showed that BLM opposition fully mediated the relationship between race and how much of the overall protest movement participants thought consisted of individuals using protests to commit crime.

Punishing Protesters on the “Other Side”: Partisan Bias in Public Support for Repressive and Punitive Responses to Protest Violence

“…Because the scenarios differ in various ways (e.g., the type of action, whether the harmful action is a criminal offense, and the ultimate outcome), similar findings may provide confidence that the results are not idiosyncratic to a particular scenario. Both vignettes also involve forms of violence and harm that have drawn public attention in recent years: rock throwing (particularly at police officers) has been widely discussed (Cho et al 2022), and COVID-19 spread constituted a concern during pandemic-era protesting (although actual rates of transmission were low; Cobbina et al 2021). Both vignettes also included experimental manipulations for (1) the severity of the violent or harmful action and (2) whether a police officer or a civilian suffered violence or harm.…”

“…In the summer of 2020, millions of people marched in support of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, protesting systemic state violence against Black communities. Despite the overwhelmingly nonviolent nature of the movement, violence and property destruction occurred in some locations (Chenoweth and Pressman 2020; Cho et al 2022). The same year also saw collective action from the political right, including “make America great again” (MAGA) protests aimed at securing a second presidential term for Donald Trump.…”

“…Although BLM and MAGA are not equivalent as social movements, nor was the violence associated with each movement the same (Brantley-Jones 2021), public and media discourse about both illustrated the salience of violence and harm in discussions about collective action. Whereas the vast majority of both left- and right-leaning protests in the United States were nonviolent throughout 2020 and 2021 (Kishi and Jones 2020; Kishi et al 2021), violence and harm by protesters consistently made headlines (Cho et al 2022; Drakulich and Denver 2022; Feinberg, Willer, and Kovacheff 2020; Gutting 2020), a common theme in media coverage of protest movements (e.g., Edwards and Arnon 2021).…”