A requiem for Black Lives Matter

Black Lives Matter has yet to receive a requiem, a summation in print. More than seven years into the globally unavoidable anti-police movement, there certainly exists a sizable BLM academic literature, dealing – as my political science colleague Bob Maranto has pointed out – with questions ranging from how the movement impacted on youth-voter turnout to the social impact of Ben & Jerry’s selling politically themed flavours of ice-cream.

However, almost no one has examined how well Black Lives Matter met its initial goals: reducing the police violence that was invariably presented as ‘epidemic’ or ‘genocidal’ and reducing crime more broadly, as brothers and others came to trust a fairer criminal justice system. For that matter, whatever happened to the literally billions of dollars donated, in good faith, to national and local BLM chapters?

This article takes a shot at those tough questions. In most cases, unfortunately, the blunt but real answer seems to be: Black Lives Matter had few, if any, positive impacts. Police violence is down slightly, if at all, while overall crime in BLM-affected areas has sky-rocketed back to 1990s levels. As Dr Maranto and I recently noted for Commentary magazine, rates of fatal shootings of civilians by US police – per an authoritative database from the Washington Post – appear to have hardly budged during the post-2014 BLM era. There were 994 fatal police shootings in toto in 2015, 958 in 2016, 981 in 2017, 993 in 2018, 999 in 2019, and 1,020 in 2020.