It’s important to highlight this point from the article:
It’s worth noting that Campbell didn’t subject the homicide findings to the same battery of statisticaltests as he did the police killings since they were not the main focus of his research. (He intends to do more research on how these protests affected crime rates.)
Just a word of caution before we jump to conclusions.
Also, I think the main findings from the research were extremely interesting in their own right; That the BLM protests were successful in achieving some of their intended aims. The effectiveness of protests are rarely assessed quantitatively so glad to see someone doing this work. It would be interesting (and probably extremely challenging) to do a cost-effectiveness estimate for BLM, considering you have to account for the counterfactual value of 350,000 people etc.
A new study, one of the first to make a rigorous academic attempt to answer that question, found that the protests have had a notable impact on police killings. For every 4,000 people who participated in a Black Lives Matter protest between 2014 and 2019, police killed one less person.
..
From 2014 to 2019, Campbell tracked more than 1,600 BLM protests across the country, largely in bigger cities, with nearly 350,000 protesters. His main finding is a 15 to 20 percent reduction in lethal use of force by police officers — roughly 300 fewer police homicides — in census places that saw BLM protests.
It’s important to highlight this point from the article:
Just a word of caution before we jump to conclusions.
Also, I think the main findings from the research were extremely interesting in their own right; That the BLM protests were successful in achieving some of their intended aims. The effectiveness of protests are rarely assessed quantitatively so glad to see someone doing this work. It would be interesting (and probably extremely challenging) to do a cost-effectiveness estimate for BLM, considering you have to account for the counterfactual value of 350,000 people etc.