Thousands of Black Lives Matter protests have been peaceful this summer, with no more than 93% of people harmed or property damaged, according to a new report on political violence in the United States.
The report found that the US government had adopted a “heavy hand approach” to the protests, using “not too often” force when officials were present.
And there has been an unsettling trend of violence and armed intimidation by individual actors, including dozens of car-raming attacks targeting protesters across the country.
With Princeton University’s Bridging Divides initiative, protests from an organization that has long tracked political violence and unrest around the world, the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (Led Clad) and the U.S. New data on the government’s response has come out.
The data assembled by Aled is seen as a reliable source of information on Yemen’s death toll, other conflicts, including the number of civilians killed by African governments and political violence against women. The organization launched a new “U.S. Emergency Monitor” project this year, raising concerns that U.S. “The risk of political violence and instability in the run-up to the 2020 general election is high.”
The results of the study are presented as contradictory compared to claims made by the Trump administration, and widely spread by Fox News and other right-wing media outlets that the U.S. is being beaten by violent leftist protesters and “domestic terrorists.”
“There have been some violent demonstrations, and they get a lot of coverage from the media,” Dr. Raudab Kishi, Eclad’s director of research and innovation, told the Guardian. “But it’s pretty peaceful if you want to see all the performances that happen.”
Between the end of May and the end of August Gust, led Clad and Princeton researchers staged 7,750 demonstrations involving the Black Lives Matter movement, in more than 2,000 different locations across the United States, as well as more than 1,000 protests related to Covid-19. A third of the Covid-19 protests were linked to the reopening of schools, the report said, adding that all of them had demonstrated peaceful protests. There were also at least 70 documentary protests over Covid-19 involving healthcare workers, and at least 37 demonstrations focused on the empty crisis.
While the overwhelming majority of the various protests that took place at this time were peaceful, the report took a violent stance on both government forces and non-state actors.
Researchers have found that government officials were more likely to intervene in protest of the Black Lives Matter than in other demonstrations, and to use teargas, rubber bullets and pepper spray, or to strike protesters with force.
They documented 392 incidents this summer in which government officials used force on Black Lives Matter protesters.
Journalists covering the Black Lives Matter protest also saw violence by government forces in at least 100 different incidents in dozens of states this summer. A journalist was shocked in the eye by a rubber bullet while covering protests over the assassination of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
The report concludes that the violent intervention by government forces did not make the protests more peaceful. In Portland in particular, the report found that the number of “demonstrations of all violence” increased from 53% to almost events૨% after federal agents arrived on the scene, intervening in the protests by “just intense unrest” by federal authorities.
At least 50 armed individuals were documented in protests this summer.
“Individual criminals – sometimes linked to hate groups like KKK – have launched dozens of car-raming attacks targeting demonstrations across the country.”
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