The Effect of the 2020 Black Lives Matter Protests on Police Budgets: How “Defund the Police” Sparked Political Backlash

Abstract

This article investigates whether a core political demand of the 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests was realized: “defund the police.” Original hand-compiled data containing budget information on 264 major cities in the United States and comprehensive protest data enable us to assess the effect of protests on changes in city police budgets. We find no evidence that BLM protests led to police defunding. In cities with large Republican vote shares, protest is associated with significant increases in police budgets. We demonstrate that electoral incentives cannot explain this policy backlash. Instead, we provide tentative evidence that backlash in Republican cities might stem from policymakers’ own conservatism and entrenched right-wing influences within city politics. The analysis offers novel evidence on the consequences of the largest protest movement in U.S. history and reveals the importance of backlash in explaining policy outcomes of social movements.