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37 J. Quantitative Criminology 1 (2021)

handle is hein.journals/jquantc37 and id is 1 raw text is: Journal of Quantitative Criminology (2021) 37:1-34 https://doi.org/10.1007/si0940-019-09443-8 ORIGINAL PAPER Don't Shoot! The Impact of Historical African American Protest on Police Killings of Civilians Jamein R Cunningham' - Rob Gillezeau2 Published online: 12 December 2019 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019 Abstract Objectives There is a long-standing history of protests in response to police killings of African American citizens. However, it remains a largely unanswered question as to whether these protest events have had any impact on subsequent police killings of African American civilians. To answer this question, we turn to the over 700 racial uprisings that occurred in the 1960s and early 1970s that were largely triggered by negative and often violent interactions between the African American community and police. Methods To determine the impact of racial uprisings on police killings of civilians, we conduct an event-study analysis with a robust set of controls. We employ data on civil- ian deaths by legal intervention by race, county-level uprising occurrence, and county demographic characteristics. We take advantage of variation in the location and timing of a county's first uprising to determine the impact of uprisings on police killings of civil- ians. Our identification strategy relies on pre-existing trends in deaths by legal intervention being uncorrelated with the date of the first uprising in a county. Results The results show that counties saw a marked increase in both non-white and white deaths due to legal intervention in the years immediately following an uprising. This initial increase is substantially larger for non-whites relative to white civilians. Deaths due to legal intervention for non-white and white civilians diverge over the medium-to-long run. Non-white deaths resulting from legal intervention remain elevated after nearly a decade while deaths of whites revert to their pre-existing trend after a handful of years. Additional analysis regarding the impact of upris- ings on policing shows that total crime and police employment do not change in a significant manner over the long run, however, officers are more likely to be killed or injured on duty. Conclusions The results clearly show that historical protest resulted in an increase in civilian deaths by legal intervention regardless of race in the short-run and a seemingly permanent increase in killings of non-white over the medium-to-long run. These results paint a depressing picture in which uprisings represent a structural change in police-civilian relations, adversely affecting white civilians in the short-run and non-white civilians in the short and long-run. Keywords Protests - Riots - Uprisings - Police homicides - Police violence - Killings by law enforcement - Black lives matters - Civil rights JEL Classification N92 - R00 - K42 - J15 E Jamein P. Cunningham jamein.p.cunningham@memphis.edu Extended author information available on the last page of the article Springer

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