{"id":200566,"date":"2021-03-03T19:08:00","date_gmt":"2021-03-04T00:08:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2021\/03\/03\/why-am-i-not-surprised-7\/"},"modified":"2021-03-03T19:08:00","modified_gmt":"2021-03-04T00:08:00","slug":"why-am-i-not-surprised-7","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2021\/03\/03\/why-am-i-not-surprised-7\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Am I Not Surprised?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In news that makes a f%$#-load of sense, it turns out that <a href=\"https:\/\/www.scientificamerican.com\/article\/killings-by-police-declined-after-black-lives-matter-protests1\/\">murders by cops declined in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>This is not surprising.&nbsp; The additional scrutiny, and the decrease in mindless support for cops murdering black people, should have the effect of cops murdering fewer black people:&nbsp;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: #2b00fe;\">Since Black Lives Matter protests gained national prominence following the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., the movement has spread to hundreds of cities and towns across the U.S. Now a new study shows police homicides have significantly decreased in most cities where such protests occurred. <\/p>\n<p>Black Lives Matter (BLM) began when Oakland, Calif.\u2013based activist Alicia Garza posted a message of protest on Facebook after George Zimmerman, a neighborhood-watch volunteer who followed and fatally shot 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Fla., was acquitted of murder in 2013. Patrisse Cullors, another Oakland community organizer, began sharing Garza\u2019s message on social media, along with the hashtag #blacklivesmatter. The slogan soon spread, building into a largely leaderless movement against structural racism and police violence. Last year, spurred by a Minneapolis police officer\u2019s killing of George Floyd, millions of people demonstrated in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/interactive\/2020\/07\/03\/us\/george-floyd-protests-crowd-size.html\">hundreds<\/a> of BLM protests throughout the U.S. <\/p>\n<p>\u201cBlack Lives Matter represents a trend that goes beyond the decentralization that existed within the Civil Rights Movement,\u201d says <a href=\"https:\/\/www.scientificamerican.com\/article\/from-civil-rights-to-black-lives-matter1\/\">Aldon Morris<\/a>, a sociologist at Northwestern University, who was not involved in the new study. \u201cThe question becomes, \u2018Are Black Lives Matter protests having any real effect in terms of generating change?\u2019 The data show very clearly that where you had Black Lives Matter protests, killing of people by the police decreased. It\u2019s inescapable from this study that protest matters\u2014that it can generate change.\u201d <\/p>\n<p>The study, posted in February as an online preprint item on the <a href=\"https:\/\/papers.ssrn.com\/sol3\/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3767097\">Social Science Research Network<\/a>, is the first of its kind to measure a possible correlation between BLM and police homicide numbers. It found that municipalities where BLM protests have been held experienced as much as a 20 percent decrease in killings by police, resulting in an estimated 300 fewer deaths nationwide in 2014\u20132019. The occurrence of local protests increased the likelihood of police departments adopting body-worn cameras and community-policing initiatives, the study also found. Many cities with larger and more frequent BLM protests experienced greater declines in police homicides.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The BLM protests made America a better place. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In news that makes a f%$#-load of sense, it turns out that murders by cops declined in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests. This is not surprising.&nbsp; The additional scrutiny, and the decrease in mindless support for cops murdering black people, should have the effect of cops murdering fewer black people:&nbsp; Since Black &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1041,978,1049,1058],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-200566","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-law-enforcement-misconduct","category-politics","category-protests","category-sociology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200566"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=200566"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200566\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=200566"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=200566"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=200566"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}