De-Policing as Reform? Police Tactics after Black Lives Matter’s 2020 Protests

Abstract

Can mass protests for racial justice influence police patrol tactics? Which racial and spatial mechanisms underlie these changes? Previous literature suggests that high-profile events can lead individual agents to alter their enforcement activities by ‘de-policing.’ However, literature is scarce (and conflicting) about the relationship of de-policing with crime, and effects across racial groups are underexplored. In this article, I argue that this apparent de-policing is, in reality, a positive reform of police patrol tactics induced by public pressure, which forced law enforcement to reconsider its approach to police-civilian interactions and focus on adopting a conservative stopping strategy, more targeted against higher-risk individuals, and more sensitive regarding the unequal treatment of minorities. To do so, I analyze this issue combining pedestrian stops and crime data from Chicago, asking whether the 2020 BLM protests led the Chicago Police Department to change its patrol strategy. When protests erupted, crime and policing got progressively decoupled: when criminality rose, stops did not. While overall crime simply returned to its pre-BLM (and pre-COVID-19) trends and levels, policing changed radically: stops, searches and arrests dropped and became stationary, while hit rates rose sharply. Stops also decreased differently across racial groups: almost exclusively for Black civilians, and mostly in minority districts. This decline in minority policing is evident across all officer groups, further indicating that the change reflects a broad shift in policing tactics rather than individual-level shirking.