On “backfire”—do you have any view on backfire of BLM protests? I’ve been concerned with the pattern of protest → police stop enforcing in a neighborhood → murder rates go up.
I wouldn’t consider this a “backfire”, although murder rates going up is definitely a bad thing. In the context of protests, a backfire isn’t when anything bad happens, it’s when the protests hurt the protesters’ goals. If “police stop enforcing in a neighborhood” is a goal of BLM protests (which it basically is), then this is a success, not a backfire, and the increase in murder rate is an unfortunate consequence.
A backfire effect would be something like: protest → protests make people feel unsafe → city allocates more funding to the police.
I’m a bit late to the party but:
I wouldn’t consider this a “backfire”, although murder rates going up is definitely a bad thing. In the context of protests, a backfire isn’t when anything bad happens, it’s when the protests hurt the protesters’ goals. If “police stop enforcing in a neighborhood” is a goal of BLM protests (which it basically is), then this is a success, not a backfire, and the increase in murder rate is an unfortunate consequence.
A backfire effect would be something like: protest → protests make people feel unsafe → city allocates more funding to the police.