How Representative of the Protest Movement Against Police Violence Are Opportunistic People Looking to Commit Crime?: Racial Differences in Public Opinion

Abstract

The largest protests in U.S. history occurred during summer 2020. Despite being overwhelmingly peaceful, some property damage, looting, and violence transpired. This study used Wave 68 of the American Trends Panel, collected by the Pew Research Center 10 days after Minneapolis police murdered George Floyd, to test whether: (1) Black people are less likely than white people to oppose Black Lives Matter (BLM); (2) compared to white people, Black people perceive individuals who use protests as a pretext for committing crime to comprise a smaller proportion of the overall protest movement; and (3) opposition to BLM mediates some or all of the relationship between race and perceptions of the degree to which people who use protests as a pretext to commit crime comprise the overall protest movement. Results from generalized ordered logistic regression analyses confirmed that, compared to white people, Black people were less likely to oppose BLM and perceived the summer 2020 protest movement to have contained fewer opportunistic individuals looking to commit crime. Pathway analysis results showed that BLM opposition fully mediated the relationship between race and how much of the overall protest movement participants thought consisted of individuals using protests to commit crime.