Protests, Racial Threat, and Social Control: How Does Protesting and Racial Threat Impact Different Types of Social Control?

Across the USA, Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests have brought attention to racial injustice and disparities in police action, including the use of lethal force. By situating BLM protests within racial resistance, and along with racial threat theory, the current study explores the influence of multiple indicators of racial and structural inequalities on racialized social control. Specifically, we offer a look at the impact of BLM protests and racial threat indicators on two forms of social control—Black violent arrests and police killings of Black Americans in a large national sample of U.S. cities. We construct an integrated dataset comprised of Harvard’s crowd counting data, Mapping Police Violence data, FBI crime statistics, and U.S. Census data. Overall, BLM protests significantly decrease violent arrests yet are statistically unrelated to police killings of Black Americans. Support for racial threat is more limited, relative to benign neglect arguments. With BLM now the largest movement in U.S. history, these findings underscore how relevant BLM can be to understanding racialized social control in contemporary American society.