Protests organized and carried out by the Marxist revolutionary group Black Lives Matter (BLM) “correlate with a 10 percent increase in murders in the areas” where those protests take place, according to a study reported by Vox.
Vox reported that University of Massachusetts Amherst Ph.D. student Travis Campbell tracked more than 350,000 protesters in 1,600 BLM protests across the country from 2014 to 2019. The non-peer-reviewed study concluded that there is a 15-20% reduction in lethal use of force by police officers — roughly 300 fewer police homicides — in census places that saw BLM protests
Campbell’s research also indicates that these protests correlate with a 10% increase in murders in those areas. That means there were somewhere between 1,000 and 6,000 more homicides than would have been expected if places with protests were on the same trend as places that did not. Campbell’s research did not include the effects of last summer’s historic wave of protests because researchers do not yet have all the relevant data.
“The reasons for this rise in murders are not fully known,” Vox continued, “but one possible explanation is that police morale drops following scrutiny, leading officers to reduce their efforts and thereby emboldening criminals. Another is that members of the public voluntarily withdraw from engagements with the police after a police homicide delegitimizes the justice system in their eyes.”
BLM rioting — by what the supportive news media like to call “mostly peaceful protesters” — also have had an impact on law enforcement injuries. By the end of September 2020, more than 470 New York City Police Department officers were injured in BLM rioting that occurred over five months.