In the course of any social movement, there comes a time in which the public opinion starts to get more divisive.
As the Black Lives Matter protests continue in the streets across the US, detractors to the movement have shown up, mainly pointing to the violence of the protests.
The public opinions and even the media coverage has more or less been divided along the party lines. Whereas the more liberal media sources focused on the police violence and the messages of the protests, conservative media pounced on the stories of looting and riots.
According to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED), a private organization that has been studying various conflicts in the world since 2014, some 10,000 protests have been held in the US. 73% of those protests cited the BLM movement as their core rally.
Of those 73%, only 7% of the protests included violence of any sort. In other words, of the nearly 8,000 BLM protests that took place between May and August, 93% of the protests did not involve any violence at all.
However, even the 7% is worth dissecting and understanding. This is because the study that ACLED conducted only looked into whether or not there was violence, not who was responsible for it. For instance, physical altercations by the police are also included in the numbers.
One thing that is absolutely certain is that there has been rioting and looting and other forms of violence that the protestors carried themselves. At the same time, there were white supremacists who had shown up to the rallies and instigated violent conflict independent of the protestors.
Thus, it would be fair to state that extremists from both ends of the political spectrum are looking for ways to utilize the civil unrest to further their causes – an objective that has often been achieved via the visible violence that we have all seen on TV.
Therefore, the data and a more in-depth analysis into the numbers suggests that regardless of your opinions on the movement, there is very little empirical evidence with which people can conclude that the BLM protests are somehow violent in its nature.
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Replaced!