Abstract
We examine whether retaliatory violence exists between law enforcement and citizens while controlling for any social media contagion effect related to prior fatal encounters. Analyzed using a trivariate dynamic structural vector-autoregressive model, daily time-series data over a 21-month period captured the frequencies of police killed in the line of duty, police deadly use of force incidents, and social media coverage. The results support a significant retaliatory violence effect against minorities by police, yet there is no evidence of retaliatory violence against law enforcement officers by minorities. Also, social media coverage of the Black Lives Matter movement increases the risk of fatal victimization to both law enforcement officers and minorities. Possible explanations for these results are based in rational choice and terror management theories.
Highlights
Fatal interactions between police and the public became the subject of increased scrutiny following the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and several subsequent controversial police shootings
Since the TWITTER variable is in first differences, while the Primed for death: Law enforcement-citizen homicides, social media, and retaliatory violence rest of the variables are in levels, we plot the cumulative impulse response functions (IRF) of this variable to a 1% shock to each of the endogenous variables in the model to be consistent with the interpretation of the IRF of the variables that are in levels
Our models found that unexpected increases in citizen deaths increased the number of law enforcement officers killed if the citizens were white nonHispanics, and decreased the number of law enforcement officers killed if the citizens were minorities
Summary
Fatal interactions between police and the public became the subject of increased scrutiny following the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and several subsequent controversial police shootings. Focusing on the contemporaneous coefficients in model 2 (Table 5), we can observe that all of the parameters, with the exception of the effect of a shock to the BLM tweets on the number of white non-Hispanics killed by law enforcement, are statistically significant at 0.01 level.
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