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Civic Responses to Police Violence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 June 2023

DESMOND ANG*
Affiliation:
Harvard University, United States
JONATHAN TEBES*
Affiliation:
University of Notre Dame, United States
*
Desmond Ang, Assistant Professor of Public Policy, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, United States, desmond_ang@hks.harvard.edu.
Jonathan Tebes, Assistant Research Professor, Department of Economics, University of Notre Dame, United States, jtebes@nd.edu.
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Abstract

Roughly a thousand people are killed by American law enforcement officers each year, accounting for more than 5% of all homicides. We estimate the causal impact of these events on civic engagement. Exploiting hyperlocal variation in how close residents live to a killing, we find that exposure to police violence leads to significant increases in registrations and votes. These effects are driven entirely by Black and Hispanic citizens and are largest for killings of unarmed individuals. We find corresponding increases in support for criminal justice reforms, suggesting that police violence may cause voters to politically mobilize against perceived injustice.

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Type
Research Article
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Political Science Association
Figure 0

Table 1. Summary Statistics

Figure 1

Figure 1. Effects by Distance from Police KillingNote: This figure shows coefficients and 95% confidence intervals from the estimation of Equation 1 on registrations. Unit of observation is the Census block election. The sample spans the 2002–2010 general elections. Indicators are mutually exclusive and track a Census block’s minimum distance to police killings that occurred prior to a given election. “In CB” refers to blocks where killings occurred. Other blocks are partitioned into 0.1-mile bins. Blue dots include election fixed effects. Red diamonds include Census block group by election fixed effects. Standard errors are clustered at the Census block group level. Full regression results are included in columns 1 and 2 of Table A.1 in the Supplementary Material.

Figure 2

Figure 2. Effects on Civic EngagementNote: This figures shows coefficients and 95% confidence intervals from the estimation of Equation 2 on registrations (pre-killing mean $ =81.6 $) and votes (pre-killing mean $ =42.9 $). Unit of observation is the Census block election. Standard errors are clustered by Census block group. The sample spans the 2002–2010 general elections and treatment is defined by blocks where a police killing occurred during the sample period. The red vertical line marks when the police killing occurred. Full regression results are included in column 1 of Table A.3 in the Supplementary Material.

Figure 3

Table 2. Effects on Civic Engagement: Alternative Specifications

Figure 4

Figure 3. Heterogeneous EffectsNote: The panels show coefficients and 95% confidence intervals from the estimation of Equation 2 on registrations and votes, collapsing the time to treatment indicators into a single posttreatment indicator. Panels A and C–E examine the effects separately for each voter group (i.e., by race, age, registration length, and party affiliation). Panels B and F include distinct posttreatment indicators corresponding to each incident type (i.e., by deceased race in Panel B and by proximity to deceased home in Panel F). Standard errors are clustered by Census block group. Unit of observation is the Census block election. The sample spans the 2002–2010 general elections and treatment is defined by blocks where police killings occurred during the sample period. Full regression results are included in Table A.5 in the Supplementary Material.

Figure 5

Figure 4. Effects by Media CoverageNote: This figure shows coefficients and 95% confidence intervals from the estimation of Equation 1 on registrations, separately for killings that were and were not reported in local newspapers. Unit of observation is the Census block election. The sample spans the 2002–2010 general elections. Indicators are mutually exclusive and track a Census block’s minimum distance to police killings that occurred prior to a given election.“In CB” refers to blocks where killings occurred. Other blocks are partitioned into 0.1-mile bins. The Census block group by election fixed effects and Census block group-clustered standard errors are included. Full regression results are included in columns 3 and 4 of Table A.1 in the Supplementary Material.

Figure 6

Figure 5. Effects by Deceased WeaponNote: This figure shows coefficients and 95% confidence intervals from the estimation of Equation 2 on registrations (pre-killing mean $ =81.6 $) and votes (pre-killing mean $ =42.9 $). Unit of observation is the Census block election. Panel A defines treatment as Census blocks with a police killing of an individual armed with a knife, gun, or other weapon. Panel B defines treatment as Census blocks with a police killing of an unarmed individual. Estimates are similar when including incidents with unknown weapon type. Standard errors are clustered by Census block group. The sample spans the 2002–2010 general elections. The red vertical line marks when the police killing occurred. Full regression results are included in columns 2 and 3 of Table A.3 in the Supplementary Material.

Figure 7

Table 3. Effects on Support for Criminal Justice Reform

Supplementary material: Link

Ang and Tebes Dataset

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Supplementary material: PDF

Ang and Tebes supplementary material

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