Jennifer Chernega. Comparative American Studies An International Journal. Volume 14, Issue 3-4. 2016.

Introduction

On August 9, 2014, Michael Brown was shot by Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson. His death was followed by protests and the deaths of Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, Freddie Gray, as well as the exonerations of police officers involved in several other officer-related deaths of African-American men and women. While white Americans were wondering why there seemed to be a sudden increase in police officers shooting and killing black Americans, people of colour in the United States were wondering why the media had been ignoring this problem for so long. Indeed, systemic police exploitation and abuse of African-American communities has been a feature of American life since the country’s earliest days, including the abuses of slavery, the Jim Crow period and leading to the current events. Academics and activists have been discussing and researching this exploitation and abuse for almost as long.

Despite academic interest in racialised policing, mainstream political and cultural discourses in the United States have, at best, not paid these issues much attention and, at worst, remained woefully ignorant of these systems of inequality. However, the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MI, subsequent protests, and police retaliation against the protesters acted as a series of disruptive events which have shed light on racial inequality, systemic racial segregation and the reality of police aggression and exploitation in African-American communities. These events continued through the following year and a half and included the trials of the officers involved in the death of Eric Garner, the death of Tamir Rice, and surrounding protests and trials and the death of Freddie Gray along with the accompanying protests. In many ways, these deaths were not unique events in the United States, but because of the initial disruption caused by the media attention in Ferguson, they have received additional media scrutiny and provided an opening for the dissemination of existing research regarding racial inequality and exploitation.

Activists used the Black Lives Matter social media hashtag (#blacklivesmatter) to draw attention to specific violent incidents, thereby successfully bringing more awareness to the ongoing systemic police abuse of communities of colour. Black Lives Matter activists are attempting to disrupt the insecurity that police activities have caused in communities of colour for decades. While it started as a hashtag, Black Lives Matter evolved into genuine social movement.

This article analyses how the events surrounding the death of Michael Brown and ensuing protests called attention to racialised police violence. I analyse Black Lives Matter as a social movement and hashtag campaign arising from these events, using social movement theory and contrast with the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. I conclude with a discussion of some changes that are a direct or indirect result of BLM’s efforts.

The Death of Michael Brown

In early August 2014, an altercation that might have gone otherwise unnoticed spurred a shift in American race relations that has rippled through almost every institution in the country. Michael Brown was a young, black man in a highly segregated city. He had recently finished high school and was readying himself for his first year of college in a few weeks. Brown was out with his friend, Dorian Johnson. Investigators concur that Brown and Johnson had recently stolen cigarillos from a local convenience store, pushing past the store owner and were walking off of the sidewalk when Darren Wilson, a Ferguson Police Officer, pulled his squad car up to the pair. After a confrontation (some claim that Wilson became aggressive, others claim that Brown was aggressive first), Wilson pulled his gun and shot Brown several times, killing him (Lopez 2016; Santhanam and Dennis 2014).

The police were slow in dealing with the scene of Brown’s death. His body was left in the street for hours after he died. Contrary to typical practice, no barriers were erected to hide the scene on this busy path, and as people in the neighbourhood returned from work, many saw him lying in the open (Parker 2015). Some claimed that he was running away from Wilson and had his hands up when he was shot; others reported that Wilson continued to shoot him even after he collapsed (Santhanam and Dennis 2014). Whatever the case may be, much of the neighbourhood was aware of Brown’s death by that evening, and rumours began to spread. The community, which had been experiencing years of racial exploitation by the police, was frustrated, angry, exhausted, and grieving. Many community members decided to hold a candlelight vigil in respect for Brown’s life and in protest of his death.

At the vigil, police responded harshly to what they saw as a confrontational gathering. They brought in armoured vehicles, riot gear, tear gas, flash-bang grenades, and guns equipped with rubber bullets. They ordered the gathered mourners to disperse. The black community members refused. What ensued was hours of confrontation and violence between the police and the participants in the vigil. On 10 August, a fire started at a gas station near the protest. The police blamed the protesters and the first reports of police using tear gas against protesters emerged (Parker 2015).

All of this may have gone unnoticed by the rest of the country, if some protesters had not videotaped their encounters with police and were distributing the videos on Twitter. Indeed, many Americans’ first inklings of what was happening in Ferguson came from the reports of black activists who were retweeting the Ferguson photos and videos. The next night, the vigil/protest continued and the police escalated their response. Protesters again used cell phones to upload near-live footage of armoured vehicles, rubber bullet wounds, and tear gas canisters to Twitter.

After three nights of protest, major media outlets could not ignore what was happening. Dorian Johnson, who was with Brown when he died, claimed to news media that Brown was trying to surrender when Wilson shot him (Parker 2015). Such TV networks as CNN, MSNBC, newspapers, and others started dispatching reporters to Ferguson (Lopez 2016). Police, who may have hoped that the protests would end quickly and without much scrutiny, did not welcome the press. They used similar crowd-dispersing techniques that they had used on the protesters to threaten reporters and arrested members of the press at a local restaurant for failing to clear the area quickly enough. Eventually, 11 members of the media from outlets including The Huffington Post, The Washington Post, Breitbart News, and Getty Images were arrested in connection with their efforts to cover the Ferguson protests (Stelter 2014).

It was not Brown’s death or the protests themselves that drew media attention. Rather, it was the escalated response by the police that finally made major news networks send reporters to Ferguson. Aymer (2016) notes that ‘the presence of militarized police to control protesters in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 evokes painful memories of watching television footage of protests in the 1960s’ (368). And even these events would have gone unnoticed without the ‘civilian journalism’ of activists posting photos, videos, and written updates to social media. This proliferation of real-time updates with photo and video would not have been possible even 10 years ago. Twitter and cell phone cameras enabled the protesters to tell the story of the Ferguson protests, as they were unfolding. However, a social media presence was not enough. Twitter is an effective way for protesters to get information quickly to their friends, family and followers, but not to the larger public. Many researchers have noted the ‘bubble’ nature of social media—that is, the news any one person receives through social media is filtered through that person’s connections. Mainstream media, by default, reaches larger audiences. Had it not been for the news media’s coverage of police treatment of reporters, Michael Brown’s death could have easily been overlooked or forgotten. Instead, the protests became a media event where the protesters and reporters were both confronting the police.

In the months following Michael Brown’s death, news organisations reported on the deaths of Tamir Rice, Vonderrit D. Myers, Akai Gurley, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland and Jamar Clark (Onyanga-Omara and Bacon 2014; Parker 2015). Each of these incidents, along with the indictment decisions and official investigations of the cases, were followed by protests, which fuelled further media attention to police violence. The quick succession of events created an environment where claims of discrimination and police violence could no longer be ignored. The activists, however, emphasised that police violence was not a new phenomenon, but a long-standing issue of insecurity in black communities.

Black Lives Matter

The phrase ‘black lives matter,’ which has become shorthand for the response to police brutality against African-Americans, began first as a Facebook post and then as a Twitter hashtag (Cobb 2016). It was created by Alicia Garza and Patrisse Cullors in response to news about George Zimmerman’s killing of Treyvon Martin in 2012 (BlackLivesMatter 2016). Opal Tometi, an immigration-rights organiser, helped Garza and Cullors create both a website and a social media presence that would allow activists to connect and engage with one another (Cobb 2016). The site, blacklivesmatter.com, describes a series of organising principles and contacts for local chapters. While Trayvon Martin’s death at the hands of another civilian instigated the creation of the hashtag, blacklivesmatter.com frequently mentions police violence against and police killings of black people as key targets of BLM activism. The website provides guiding principles for BLM activism, including a variety of concerns that extend beyond racialised policing, from black poverty and genocide to mass incarceration, from hetero-patriarchal norms to the treatment of black undocumented immigrants and disadvantages faced by black Americans living with disabilities (BlackLivesMatter 2016). However, akin to other grassroots activist movements, it does not state a set of explicit policy goals.

One division within BLM centres upon ‘ownership’ of the hashtag and any ensuing movement. While the hashtag and website were created by Garza, Cullors, and Tometi, the hashtag gained recognition and wide usage only during protests in Ferguson. During that time, prominent protestors DeRay Mckesson, Johnetta Elzie, and Brittany Packett became the face of the protests and were associated with the ‘black lives matter’ phrase, despite the fact that none of them officially belong to a chapter of BLM as listed on the website (Cobb 2016). In fact, Johnetta Elzie has publicly rejected Garza, Cullors and Tometi as the founders of BLM because she asserts that it was born out of the Ferguson protests, not the death of Trayvon Martin (Cobb 2016). Research seems to partially support Elzie’s claim. The #blacklivesmatter hashtag was only used approximately 48 times a day before Ferguson, and in August, the month that Brown died, it was used more than 52,000 times (Demby 2016; Freelon, McIlwain, and Clark 2016). In four hours after the grand jury failed to indict Wilson in Brown’s death, the hashtag was used 92,784 times (Demby 2016; Freelon, McIlwain, and Clark 2016). Lack of cohesion is a defining feature of BLM, making it hard to understand the movement, who is involved, and where it is going.

Social Movement Theory

Social movement theory (Buechler 1995; McCarthy and Zald 2009; Opp 2009) can help us better understand the nature of BLM and where it fits in the trajectory of US social movements. Social movements are by their very nature disruptive. They are intended to break with the status quo. Social movement theory posits that movements develop in relation to particular circumstances. These circumstances include the availability of resources such as finances, labour, etc. In addition, movements develop around coalescing moments of cultural awareness that allow others to understand and rally behind the message of a social movement. Sometimes, these moments are manufactured. For example, during the 1960s, protesters would often deliberately place themselves in the line of attack from angry police or counter-protesters, especially when video cameras or members of the news media were present. Images of peaceful protesters being beaten by angry, white officers or civilians covered newspapers and dominated television, creating sympathy for the movement and highlighting the extent of discrimination against people of colour in the US. This coalescing moment was important for the Civil Rights movement because, without it, many tended to believe that there was little inequality and that complaints by African-Americans were unfounded.

The deaths of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, and others provided a series of tragic opportunities for coalescence. Rather than manufacturing coalescing moments, BLM could take advantage of an existing set of tragic circumstances to publicise the actions of police as well as each subsequent acquittal of police officers involved in deaths to continue the public conversation about police brutality. BLM also organised high profile protests to deliberately disrupt the daily lives of white Americans, bringing attention to their cause. Examples include successfully blocking highway traffic in Minnesota in the wake of Jamar Clark’s death and the large protest that shut down many stores along Michigan Avenue in Chicago, following the release of video showing the police shooting of an unarmed Laquan McDonald the previous year. While many whites complained about these events and the traffic or shopping delays they experienced, the intent was to draw the attention of white Americans and the media to the protesters’ message. Certainly, BLM’s use of both circumstantial and manufactured coalescing moments is consistent with the behaviour of social movements under the theory.

A subset of social movement theory focuses on rational choice. Rational Choice theory describes social movements as the result of rational actors responding to structural inequalities in which the consequences of the status quo are perceived as being greater than the consequences of engaging in a movement (Opp 2009). Rational choice theory argues that BLM movement members have weighed the costs and benefits of participating in protest and found them to be favourable when compared to the costs and benefits of not participating. This portion of the theory seems to clearly describe the position of BLM activists. The very phrase itself, ‘Black Lives Matter,’ is an attempt to preserve life, to create safety for black Americans in the face of police violence.

Resource mobilisation theory, another subset of social movement theory, argues that well-organised, centralised movements are likely to be more successful than diffuse, less-organised movements (McCarthy and Zald 2009). This theory would predict that BLM, with its decentralised structure, loose organisation of groups around the country, lack of clear leaders, and diverse aims would be less successful than if the members had created a more centralised, structured organisation to achieve a set of well-defined goals. Like the Occupy Wall Street Movement (another loosely structured social movement born out of the lack of legal consequences for Wall Street speculation that led to the 2008 recession), BLM rejected a centralised organisational structure in favour of smaller cells of activists working in a network of urban areas throughout the United States. In some cases, this loose organisation has made it difficult to identify whether political actions were related to BLM or not. For example, activists Marissa Johnson and Mara Willaford interrupted Senator Bernie Sanders and demanded access to his microphone at a campaign event during the primaries of the US presidential election in Seattle, Washington in 2016. They identified themselves as being part of Black Lives Matter, but others affiliated with the movement said they didn’t know Johnson and Willaford (Cobb 2016). This kind of confusion is expected, according to resource mobilisation theory, and would be alleviated by a more centralised organisational structure. Such a structure, however, has been shunned by both the BLM and Occupy movements because of a distrust of central organisations and fears of appropriation. Resource mobilisation theory would also predict that more organisation would make it easier for BLM to draw financial and other resources to its central cause, if its participants want to be seen as a movement.

New social movement theory argues that movements since the 1960s differ significantly from those before in that they are focused on identity issues (such as the gay pride movement) or in support of general ideals (such as environmentalism or animal rights) rather than specific policy goals. Some have described new social movements as being primarily social or cultural and only tangentially, if at all, political (Buechler 1995). BLM seems to adhere to some of the expectations of new social movements while defying others. There are aspects of black pride or reclamation of black identity in BLM, but the primary focus of BLM is overtly political and deals with the oppression of African-Americans by the police and other institutions in the US. Like earlier movements, BLM is focused on correcting particular inequalities and draws from a working-class, if non-white, membership base. However, like new social movements, BLM’s interest is not primarily in economic issues but rather, with police brutality. Also like some new social movements, some wings of BLM have not sought particular policy changes, as noted on the blacklivesmatter website (BlackLivesMatter 2016), while other portions have been more direct about advocating for particular policies, as can be seen with McKesson, Packnett and Elzie’s efforts with Campaign Zero (Joincampaignzero 2016). This very divergence within the movement makes it hard to characterise as either a traditional social movement or a new social movement. BLM seems to fit most of the expectations of a social movement under social movement theory, although resource mobilisation theory would predict that a more centralised structure would help direct resources to BLM’s goals.

Black Lives Matter and Historical Racial Protest Movements in the US

If we understand BLM as a social movement, we can compare it to other black protest movements in the US to see how these movements have changed over time. In many ways, BLM resembles the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s especially in its protest tactics. Martin Luther King’s nonviolent tactics often relied on acting nonviolently, but in ways that would provoke anger and violence from authorities. BLM has adopted this same tactic in the way that they actively publicise violent reactions against their members. Also, like the Civil Rights movement, BLM has utilised both marches and more disruptive protest techniques such as sit-ins (or die-ins).

Like the more radical Black Panther and Black Power movements, BLM declares itself to be ‘unapologetically black’ (BlackLivesMatter 2016). Analysis of use of the #Blacklivesmatter hashtag has shown that Twitter discussion around BLM remained ‘black-led’ throughout the year after Brown’s death (Freelon, McIlwain, and Clark 2016). As Freelon et al. note

During no period do non-Black voices constitute an overwhelming majority of the most-referenced users … It is significant that many of the most widely heard voices are also Black, and that this holds true even during times of heightened attention. (2016, 75)

Thus, black activists are presenting the narrative of events that they want heard, circumventing the mainstream media’s narrative and maintaining control of the ‘blackness’ of the movement.

Also, like the later stages of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s, Black Lives Matter is interested in general class inequalities as well as specifically racial inequalities. Barbara Ransby’s work argues that Black Lives Matter should be seen as part of a larger, left-wing agenda to equalise class inequalities. Indeed, Ransby claims that ‘Black Lives Matter, which includes nearly a dozen black-led organisations, is as much an example of a US-based class struggle as Occupy Wall Street was’ (2015, 1). She goes on to describe the labour and economic justice connections of many BLM leaders as well as the BLM involvement in the effort to pass a $15 per hour minimum wage. The challenge, according to Ransby, is to recognise the intersection of class and race inequality in a way that diminishes neither. This resembles Martin Luther King, Jr.’s interest in spurring a ‘poor people’s movement’ that would be racially inclusive and address overall economic inequalities near the end of his life.

However, there are many ways in which BLM differs from the 1960s Civil Rights movement. Black women and the work of black women are far more prominent and celebrated by BLM than in previous black movements. The BLM website advocates for ‘a Black women affirming space free from sexism, misogyny, and male-centeredness.’ While women were important members of previous African-American movements, such as the Civil Rights movement and the Black Panther movement, both of those movements could be defined as ‘male centered.’ Along the same lines, the principles regarding black families (‘We are committed to making our spaces family-friendly and enable parents to fully participate with their children. We are committed to dismantling the patriarchal practice that requires mothers to work “double shifts” that require them to mother in private even as they participate in justice work.’) and black villages (‘We are committed to disrupting the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, and especially “our” children to the degree that mothers, parents and children are comfortable’) both refer to issues of gender, whether dismantling patriarchal practices or creating spaces comfortable for mothers (BlackLivesMatter 2016).

Black Lives Matter, while focusing on police violence against black men, was started by three queer women of colour and has been led by a coalition of black men and women. It is important to note that while BLM initially dealt with police violence against black men and boys, many of the leaders of the BLM movement and its most visible protesters have been women of colour. From Bree Newsome, a filmmaker, musician and activist who climbed the flagpole outside of the South Carolina statehouse to cut down the confederate flag, to the mothers of Eric Garner, Tamir Rice and Michael Brown, as well as Eric Garner’s daughter, women of colour have been prominent in the BLM movement. Indeed, some of the highest profile protests were organised and carried out by black women, and took place at political rallies for Democratic nominee candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. In one case, a young black woman raised a sign at a small Clinton rally calling Hillary Clinton to task for her support of her husband’s ‘tough on crime’ policies which increased mass incarceration of African-American men and Clinton’s use of the term ‘super predators’ to describe black youth.

Despite the female-centredness of the BLM website, the visibility of women in the movement and the rhetoric used by the movements’ founders, BLM may also be falling into other familiar patterns where male voices dominate in the movement. Freelon, McIlwain & Clark, in an analysis of the #blacklivesmatter hashtag found that the top ten ‘high centers’—most influential connectors, activists, and media personalities on Twitter—were mostly men (2016). Only one woman (Johnetta Elzie, tweeting as @Nettaaaaaaaa) was in that top ten group, which is notable, considering the prominence of black women on Twitter as a platform (Demby 2016; Freelon, McIlwain, and Clark 2016).

There are other ways in which BLM diverges from previous racial equality movements. Historically, black movements have not been as inclusive of LGBTQ identities. However, BLM explicitly states acceptance of LGBTQ people in its guiding principles. Under the ‘transgender affirming’ principle, the website states,

We are committed to embracing and making space for trans brothers and sisters to participate and lead. We are committed to being self-reflexive and doing the work required to dismantle cis-gender privilege and uplift Black trans folk, especially Black trans women who continue to be disproportionately impacted by trans-antagonistic violence. (BlackLivesMatter 2016)

Some critics in social media have gone so far as to accuse BLM of being a ‘gay movement masquerading as a black one’ (Cobb 2016).

Another way in which BLM differs from the Civil Rights movement or the Black Panther movement is the lack of a religious component. The 1960s Civil Rights movement was rooted in black Christian churches and religious organisations gave the movement space to organise and built in membership networks. The Black Panther movement was connected to the Nation of Islam, alongside its socialist origins. The Black Panthers embraced Islam as a world religion with African origins, in contrast to a perception of Christianity as being an Anglo-European tool of domination. In contrast to both of these previous movements, BLM is not connected to a specific religious doctrine and, instead, explicitly states that the movement is inclusive of all black lives, ‘regardless of … religious belief or disbelief’ (BlackLivesMatter 2016).

Black Lives Matter activists have a history of rejecting the tactics of previous Civil Rights movements. For example, while Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was known for working closely with politicians to craft legislation and plan protests, BLM activists do not. One prominent BLM activist, Aislinn Pulley declined an invitation to attend an event at the White House claiming that the meeting was a ‘photo opportunity’ and a ‘sham’ (Cobb 2016). However, even in this, the BLM movement is split, as two other activists accepted the White House invitation and later described the meeting as useful (Cobb 2016).

Previous racial-equality movements have tended to operate with a charismatic leader who acts as both spokesperson and lead tactician in the movement. Whether it was Martin Luther King’s famous marches or Malcolm X’s vibrant speeches, both moderate and more radical movements have used charismatic leaders. Black Lives Matter, in contrast, deliberately eschews that model for a more grassroots, horizontal movement structure (Cobb 2016).

All of this makes BLM a complicated movement to understand and the kind of organisation which, chameleon-like, can appear to be different things to different people. Such ambiguity could be an asset in terms of bringing more people to the movement, but can also dilute a centralised message and, without clear policy initiatives, may leave activists feeling ungrounded.

Impacts of Black Lives Matter on Awareness

One of the clearest impacts of the Black Lives Matter movement has been on increased awareness of racialised policing among Americans. In interviews with Twitter users, Freelon et al. found that the main goals of many BLM hashtag users were ‘education’ and ‘amplification’ (2016, 79). According to Freelon et al., ‘They described using this and other related hashtags to draw attention to structural anti-Blackness, inequality, and erasure that contributes to a lack of awareness surrounding police misconduct and Black communities’ (2016, 79). Thus, raising awareness was a key goal for many involved in BLM. By staging high profile protests in reaction to events surrounding black deaths at the hands of police, each one of those deaths adds to the list in Americans’ minds of black men and women killed by the police. However, awareness of individual deaths is not the only way that Black Lives Matter has affected the US media.

Remarkably, there is no government agency that collects data about police shootings or civilian deaths while people are in police custody. In the wake of Michael Brown’s death, and at the urging of the BLM movement, several news outlets starting attempting to compile such data. The results largely supported the suspicions of BLM activists: deaths related to police shootings or police custody seemed to disproportionately affect African-Americans.

The Washington Post undertook an effort to document and compile data about every police shooting death in 2015. They found that 40% of the unarmed men shot to death were African-American, even though black men only make up 6% of the US population. Also troubling, they found that while most of the people killed after attacking someone with a weapon were white, those who were killed after ‘exhibiting less threatening behavior’ were much more likely (60%) to be black or Hispanic (Kindy et al. 2015). The Washington Post specifically said that they undertook the project as a result of Michael Brown’s death and the protests that followed (Kindy et al. 2015).

DeRay Mckesson, Brittany Packnett, and Johnetta Elzie, the activists from the Ferguson protests who are often associated with Black Lives Matter, along with a data scientist and policy analyst, began the Mapping Police Violence project that collects ‘comprehensive data on police killings nationwide to quantify the impact of police violence in communities’ (mappingpoliceviolence.org 2016). The website for the project provides data from 2014 and 2015 as well as a series of compelling graphics that activists, speakers, or journalists can use to illustrate issues about police violence. While much of the data focuses on racial disparities, there is also information about geography, criminality, and police accountability (mappingpoliceviolence.org 2016). Mckesson, Packnett and Elzie describe the project as coming directly out of the Ferguson protests.

Both Vox.com (Lind 2015) and ProPublica (Gabrielson, Grochowski Jones, and Sagara 2014) have published stories with interactive media and compelling graphics depicting the racialised nature of police killings. Both organisations cite the death of Michael Brown as the impetus for investigating the issue.

Black Lives Matter has changed how journalists approach reporting on racial issues, especially protests over racial inequality. Lambert (2016) notes how the BLM movement in Minnesota was able to quickly build crowds and media attention during their protests following the police shooting death of Jamar Clark in November 2015. Lambert goes on to describe how the immediacy of social media and online news reporting present challenges in reporting on racially charged incidents accurately. Lamberts quotes Nekima Levy-Pounds, the president of the Minneapolis NAACP, an activist in the Minneapolis BLM chapter and former professor of Law at the University of St. Thomas, as saying that pulling national media attention to local issues helps raise the bar for local reporting and that gaining the attention of those national media is easier in the wake of the deaths of Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, and others (2016). According to Lambert, Levy-Pounds used social media to draw the attention of national news outlets within hours of Jamar Clark’s death.

Beyond journalism, organisations are working to make documenting police violence easier. An ‘app’ for smartphones created by the New York Civil Liberties Union allows users to film interactions with the police that are automatically sent to the NYCLU for analysis and to be used in their work to hold the NYPD accountable for any inappropriate actions. The app also alerts users when someone is being stopped in the area so that the user can come and monitor the situation or to simply keep community groups informed about the police activity in their neighbourhood. Third, the app includes a survey that observers can fill out if they see or experience a police stop. The survey is automatically triggered with the filming function, but can also be sent separately, if a user didn’t film a police interaction. Finally, the app includes information about people’s rights in interactions with the police, including the right to film or otherwise record police activity (NYCLU 2016). The intent here is to bring racialised policing or police brutality to public light much more directly than was previously possible.

Impacts of Black Lives Matter on Policy

Increased awareness of racialised policing is not the only outcome of the destabilisation surrounding Black Lives Matter. Since Michael Brown’s death and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, there has been a small but discernible increase in the proportion of police officers charged for crimes. National Public Radio’s investigation found that over the last 10 years, the number of homicide charges against police have averaged about five per year. But by November 2015, there had been 15 officers charged that year with murder or manslaughter because of an on-duty shooting. While this is still a small number compared to the number of police-related deaths, it is a significant increase and would seem to be related to increased pressure resulting from protests and the wide dissemination of video footage of police-related deaths (Kaste 2015).

There has also been an increased interest in prison reform and ending mass incarceration from, surprisingly, both sides of the political spectrum. During the 2016 presidential election, it became clear that Hillary Clinton has undergone a significant shift on this topic, from her ‘tough on crime’ statements in the 1990s to claiming that it is time to ‘end the era of mass incarceration’ in April 2015 (Kilgore 2015). This shift seems to be, in part, a reaction to Black Lives Matter protests at her campaign events and personal meetings with BLM activists (Kilgore 2015). During the Republican nomination process most of the candidates proposed some combination of criminal justice reforms including Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, New Gingrich, Chris Christie, and Rand Paul. These calls for reform usually involved decreased spending on prisons, drug sentencing reform to reduce sentences and replace prison time with treatment for drug addiction (Kilgore 2015), although the links to BLM are less clear. Donald Trump, the eventual Republican nominee, however, never adopted such reforms as part of his campaign.

McKesson, Packnett, and Elzie, along with policy analyst and data scientist Samuel Sinyangwe, have also launched a project called Campaign Zero (JoinCampaignZero 2016) which aims to build upon their research in mapping police violence and turn that information into policy changes that will eliminate police-involved deaths. Part of this initiative involves collecting police union contracts from around the country to identify contract provisions that unfairly protect officers from misconduct investigations and disciplinary action. Campaign Zero, unlike the official Black Lives Matter website, advocates for concrete policy changes around one goal—eliminating police violence.

Conclusion

The events of 2014 and 2015, starting with the death of Michael Brown and continuing with a series of high-profile deaths of African Americans at the hands of police officers, have destabilised the obliviousness of whites regarding racialised policing. While African American communities have lived under the insecurity of hyper-surveillance for decades, it took a city’s high-profile protest, a disproportionate police response, and the beginning of a movement to bring the media’s attention to police violence. Social media, especially Twitter, also emerged as key tools for both organising protest as well as informing others about what was happening in Ferguson, MO. The shocking images on Twitter brought the attention of mainstream media outlets, who further broadcast the protest and the police response to millions of American homes who would have not otherwise seen them.

Given the importance of Twitter as a key organisational tool during the Ferguson protest, it is perhaps unsurprising that social media created space for the development of a new social movement group—a group that was born out of a hashtag. As a social movement, Black Lives Matter meets some of the expectations of both traditional and new social movements. BLM’s emphasis on racial identity, use of general guidelines rather than specific policy initiatives, lack of central organisation and rejection of a religious orientation make it more like new social movements than traditional ones. However, the protest tactics of BLM, as well as its attempts to capitalise on coalescing moments seem like echoes of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.

It will be some time before we will be able to fully assess the direct and indirect impacts of BLM on policy, police and politics, but it does seem clear that BLM has had an impact on the 2016 presidential election and has raised awareness of racial inequalities and police violence. Black Lives Matter, as an amorphous, grassroots association that doesn’t follow the patterns of past Civil Rights movements, has helped raise awareness and pressure politicians into proposing structural changes in the criminal justice system.