(Illustration by Eric Nyquist)
Each year, some 1,000 individuals, mostly people of color, are killed by police officers in the United States. The overwhelming majority of these incidents do not result in legal sanctions for police, and media coverage beyond the community where the event took place is often limited or nonexistent.
Desmond Ang, an applied economist and professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, studies police killings as part of a larger research agenda that considers the causes and consequences of racial discrimination. Ang recently teamed up with Jonathan Tebes, an economist at the University of Notre Dame, to analyze how police killings affect civic engagement.
Police killings can generate expressions of concern about injustice or discrimination in the community, but Ang and Tebes suspected that voter turnout might be diminished as a result of these encounters with the criminal justice system. People might believe, “There’s no reason for me to vote because the system is built against people like me,” Ang explains. Instead, his findings showed that the opposite was the case. Police violence led to increases in Black and Hispanic voter registration and turnout.
Political scientists have established causal links between police brutality and social and civic unrest, demonstrating how police violence has triggered the country’s largest urban uprisings since the 1960s, following the beatings of Marquette Frye and Rodney King in Los Angeles and the killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Concerns about racism can reach a climax in the aftermath of police violence, leading to rallies, public protests, and other forms of civic engagement. What has been less well-known, however, is how police killings inform participation in formal democratic processes such as voting.
“If you are arrested, or you are imprisoned, you are much less likely to vote,” Ang says. “That’s not simply because of felony disenfranchisement laws. These experiences seem to have a demobilizing effect.”
Drawing on highly detailed data from Los Angeles between 2002 and 2010, the researchers brought together two troves of information to tell a story about the real-world consequences of police violence. First, they used novel incident-level data, which includes when and where each police killing took place, the context in which the incident occurred, the race of the victim, whether the person killed possessed a weapon, and other relevant facts. The second resource was public voting data aggregated to census blocks—essentially, city street blocks—which identified how people voted and how many people were registered and included breakdowns by race, age, party affiliation, and more.
Combining the two data sources, Ang says, “allowed us to examine, in a very detailed and defined way, what happened to voting on blocks where police killings occurred. We could compare changes in voting in the surrounding blocks. By virtue of being slightly farther away, perhaps someone didn’t know about the police killing, or didn’t know the person who was killed.” This difference provided the researchers with a control group. Concentrating on a particular location, they could compare before and after scenarios for a set of people who knew about a police killing vis-à-vis a similar set of people who did not. Their results showed significant increases in civic engagement as more Black and Hispanic individuals registered to vote. They found no comparable effect for local white or Asian residents.
Zooming in, the researchers further dissected the data, examining how community responses changed depending on the circumstances of the killing, such as whether the person killed by police was armed. They discovered even larger effects when police killed unarmed people, which translated to increased support for criminal justice reform. Looking at city block-level yes/no support for various propositions, the researchers found a large increase in support for criminal justice reform in the wake of police killings of unarmed individuals.
“What the authors contribute is a modest glimmer of hope to an otherwise tragic set of occurrences,” says Adriane Fresh, a professor of political science at Duke University. “While it remains possible that some individuals are demobilized from civic engagement as a result of the police killings, such demobilization is swamped by those who are arguably seeking a remedy for the state’s use of force through the political process. That these individuals are Black and Hispanic and may be otherwise less likely to engage politically means that a new group is entering the political arena. This engagement may have consequences beyond criminal justice policy.”
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Find the full study: Desmond Ang and Jonathan Tebes, “Civic Responses to Police Violence,” American Political Science Review, forthcoming.
Read more stories by Daniela Blei.