CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 195Policing Practices and PerceptionsRace, History, and American SocietyCriminal Justice and Corrections Analysis

Black Lives Matter: Evidence that Police-Caused Deaths Predict Protest Activity

Open access
Williamson, Vanessa, Trump, Kris-Stella, Einstein, Katherine Levine·2018·Perspectives on Politics
DOI 10.1017/s1537592717004273
Open this paper in CoChat — free accountOpen PDF

Abstract

Since 2013, protests opposing police violence against Black people have occurred across a number of American cities under the banner of “Black Lives Matter.” We develop a new dataset of Black Lives Matter protests that took place in 2014–2015 and explore the contexts in which they emerged. We find that Black Lives Matter protests are more likely to occur in localities where more Black people have previously been killed by police. We discuss the implications of our findings in light of the literature on the development of social movements and recent scholarship on the carceral state’s impact on political engagement.

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1017/s1537592717004273

Cites

5 of 5 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • BLM protests are more likely to happen in locations where there has recently been a fatal interaction with police.

    “Recent research has found that BLM protests are more likely to happen in locations where there has recently been a fatal interaction with police (Williamson, Trump, and Einstein 2018)”

    From BLACK LIVES MATTER PROTESTS, FATAL POLICE INTERACTIONS, AND CRIME (2021) · cites this paper as Williamson, Trump, and Einstein 2018

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

Research works printed but not linked: 49

  1. Alexander, Michelle. 2012. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: New Press.
  2. Andreas, Peter and Richard Price. 2001. "From War Fighting to Crime Fighting: Transforming the American National Security State." International Studies Review 3(3): 31-52.
  3. Barreto, Matt A., Sylvia Manzano, Ricardo Ramírez, and Kathy Rim. 2009. "Mobilization, Participation, and Solidaridad: Latino Participation in the 2006 Immigration Protest Rallies." Urban Affairs Review 44(5): 736-64.
  4. Bobo, Lawrence and Vincent L. Hutchings. 1996. "Perceptions of Racial Group Competition: Extending Blumer's Theory of Group Position to a Multiracial Social Context." American Sociological Review. 61(4): 951-72.
  5. Brooks, Richard R. W. and Haekyung Jeon-Slaughter. 2001. "Race, Income, and Perceptions of the US Court System." Behavioral Sciences & the Law 19(2): 249-64.
  6. Burch, Traci. 2013. Trading Democracy for Justice: Criminal Convictions and the Decline of Neighborhood Political Participation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  7. Campbell, Andrea Louise. 2003. How Policies Make Citizens: Senior Political Activism and the American Welfare State. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
  8. Carey, Tony E., Regina P. Branton, and Valerie Martinez-Ebers. 2014. "The Influence of Social Protests on Issue Salience among Latinos." Political Research Quarterly 67(3): 615-27.
  9. Chenoweth, Erica and Maria J. Stephan. 2011. Why civil resistance works: The strategic logic of nonviolent conflict. New York: Columbia University Press.
  10. Chong, Dennis. 2014. Collective Action and the Civil Rights Movement. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  11. Christina Wolbrecht, Rodney E. Hero, Peri E. Arnold, and Alvin B. Tillery. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
  12. Clear, Todd R., Dina R. Rose, and Judith A. Ryder. 2001. "Incarceration and the Community: The Problem of Removing and Returning Offenders." Crime and Delinquency 47(3): 335-51.
  13. Dalton, Russell, Alix Van Sickle, and Steven Weldon. 2010. "The Individual-Institutional Nexus of Protest Behaviour." British Journal of Political Science 40(1): 51-73.
  14. Davenport, Christian, Sarah A. Soule, and David A. Armstrong. 2011. "Protesting while Black? The Differential Policing of American Activism, 1960 to 1990." American Sociological Review 76(1): 152-78.
  15. Dawson, Michael C. 1995. Behind the Mule: Race and Class in African-American Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
  16. De Weerd, Marga and Bert Klandermans. 1999. "Group Identification and Political Protest: Farmers' Protest in the Netherlands." European Journal of Social Psychology 29(8): 1073-95.
  17. Einstein, Katherine Levine and Vladimir Kogan. 2016. "Pushing the City Limits: Policy Responsiveness in Municipal Government." Urban Affairs Review 52(1): 3-32.
  18. Eisinger, Peter. 1973. "The Conditions of Protest Behavior in American Cities." American Political Science Review 81(1): 11-28.
  19. Fitzgerald, Scott T. and Ryan E. Spohn. 2005. "Pulpits and Platforms: The Role of the Church in Determining Protest among Black Americans." Social Forces 84(2): 1015-48.
  20. Foster, Mindi D. and Kimberly Matheson. 1999. "Perceiving and Responding to the personal/Group Discrimination Discrepancy." Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 25(10): 1319-29.
  21. Frymer, Paul. 2011. Uneasy Alliances: Race and Party Competition in America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
  22. Gay, Claudine. 2002. "Spirals of Trust? The Effect of Descriptive Representation on the Relationship between Citizens and Their Government." American Journal of Political Science 46(4): 717-32. . 2004. "Putting Race in Context: Identifying the Environmental Determinants of Black Racial Attitudes." American Political Science Review 98(4): 547-62.
  23. Gerber, Alan S., Gregory A. Huber, Marc Meredith, Daniel R. Biggers, and David J. Hendry. Forthcoming. "Does Incarceration Reduce Voting? Evidence about the Political Consequences of Spending Time in Prison." The Journal of Politics 79(4): 1130-1146.
  24. Gurr, Ted. 1968. "A Causal Model of Civil Strife: A Comparative Analysis Using New Indices." American Political Science Review 62(4): 1104-24.
  25. Harmon, Rachel. 2013. "Why Do We (Still) Lack Data on Policing?" Marquette Law Review 96(4): 1120-46.
  26. Hochschild, Jennifer and Vesla Weaver. 2015. "Is the Significance of Race Declining in the Political Arena? Yes, and No." Ethnic and Racial Studies 38(8): 1250-57.
  27. Lebron, Christopher J. 2017. The Making of Black Lives Matter: A Brief History of an Idea. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  28. Lerman, Amy E. and Vesla Weaver. 2014. "Staying Out of Sight? Concentrated Policing and Local Political Action." Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 651(1): 202-19.
  29. Lynch, James P. and John P. Jarvis. 2008. "Missing Data and Imputation in the Uniform Crime Reports and the Effects on National Estimates." Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice 24(1): 69-85.
  30. Maloney, William A., Grant Jordan, and Andrew M. McLaughlin. 1994. "Interest Groups and Public Policy: The Insider/Outsider Model Revisited." Journal of Public Policy 14(1): 17-38.
  31. Mansbridge, Jane. 1999. "Should Blacks Represent Blacks And Women Represent Women? A Contingent "Yes"." Journal of Politics 61(3): 628-57.
  32. McCarthy, John and Mayer Zald. 1977. "Resource Mobilization and Social Movements: A Partial Theory." American Journal of Sociology 82(6): 1212-41.
  33. Meyer, David S. 2004. "Protest and Political Opportunities." Annual Review of Sociology 30: 125-45.
  34. Miller, Lisa L. 2015. "What's Violence Got to Do with It? Inequality, Punishment, and State Failure in US Politics." Punishment & Society 17(2): 184-210.
  35. Muller, Christopher and Daniel Schrage. 2014. "Mass Im- prisonment and Trust in the Law." Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 651(1): 139-58.
  36. Olteanu, Alexandra, Ingmar Weber, and Daniel Gatica- Perez. 2016. "Characterizing the Demographics behind the #BlackLivesMatter Movement." Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Conference Pro- ceedings: 310-313.
  37. Reynolds-Stenson, Heidi. 2017. "Protesting the Police: Anti- Police Brutality Claims as a Predictor of Police Repression of Protest." Social Movement Studies 17(1): 48-63.
  38. Simon, Bernd and P. G. Klandermans. 2001. "Toward a Social Psychological Analysis of Politicized Collective Identity: Conceptualization, Antecedents, and Consequences." American Psychologist 56(4): 319-31.
  39. Stanley, Damian A., Peter Sokol-Hessner, Mahzarin R. Banaji, and Elizabeth A. Phelps. 2011. "Implicit Race Attitudes Predict Trustworthiness Judgments and Economic Trust Decisions." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108(19): 7710-15.
  40. Tate, Katherine. 1991. "Black Political Participation in the 1984 and 1988 Presidential Elections." American Political Science Review 85(4): 1159-76. . 1993. From Protest to Politics: The New Black Voters in American Elections. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press and Russell Sage Foundation Press.
  41. Tausanovitch, Chris and Christopher Warshaw. 2015. "Representation in Municipal Government." American Political Science Review 108(3): 605-41.
  42. Verba, Sidney, Kay Lehman Schlozman, and Henry E. Brady. 1995. Voice and Equality: Civic Voluntarism in American Politics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
  43. Wacquant, Loic. 2009. Prisons of Poverty. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
  44. Walker, Hannah L. 2014. "Extending the Effects of the Carceral State: Proximal Contact, Political Participation, and Race." Political Research Quarterly 67(4): 809-22.
  45. Wallace, Sophia J., Chris Zepeda-Millán, and Michael Jones-Correa. 2014. "Spatial and Temporal Proximity: Examining the Effects of Protests on Political Attitudes." American Journal of Political Science 58(2): 433-48.
  46. Weaver, Vesla M. 2007. "Frontlash: Race and the Development of Punitive Crime Policy." Studies in American political development 21(2): 230-65.
  47. Weaver, Vesla and Amy Lerman. 2010. "Political Consequences of the Carceral State." American Political Science Review 104(4): 817-33.
  48. Weitzer, Ronald and Steven A. Tuch. 2002. "Perceptions of Racial Profiling: Race, Class, and Personal Experience." Criminology 40(2): 435-56.
  49. Wilkes, Rima. 2004. "First Nation Politics: Deprivation, Resources, and Participation in Collective Action." Sociological Inquiry 74(4): 570-89.

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Williamson, V., Trump, K.-S., & Einstein, K. L.
Affiliations
Boston University (US)
ORCID
Venue
Perspectives on Politics
Publisher
Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Published
2018-05-16
Volume
16
Issue
2
Pages
400-415
ISSN
  • 1537-5927 (ISSN-L)
  • 1541-0986
DOI
10.1017/s1537592717004273
OpenAlex
W2804489667
Cited by
195
References
5
Citations by year
2026: 44 · 2025: 14 · 2024: 19 · 2023: 22 · 2022: 41 · 2021: 25 · 2020: 24 · 2019: 6
FWCI
59.84
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
www.cambridge.org/core/terms (unspecified)
Locations
Perspectives on Politics (publishedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Political Science and International Relations › Policing Practices and Perceptions
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Race, History, and American Society
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis
Keywords
Black Lives Matter, police brutality, police killings, protest behavior, social movements, carceral state, political participation, racial inequality, African Americans

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review