Tag: protest

“Did the social justice protests of 2020 cause a wave of police officers to leave the force? A recent study suggests the truth may not be so simple.
In May 2020, a Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd by pinning him to the ground with his knee. When video of the encounter circulated online, the image of a white police officer nonchalantly kneeling atop a black man until he asphyxiated ignited a powder keg: Americans, stir-crazy from sheltering in place for the first three months of the COVID-19 pandemic, took to the streets to protest police brutality, in some cases violently.

The conventional wisdom says that amid a nationwide spike in crime and mounting protests in which demonstrators proclaimed that “all cops are bastards,” many officers simply gave in.”

…

“A June 2021 survey from the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) found a 45 percent increase in retirements in 2020–2021 when compared to the previous year, as well as an 18 percent rise in resignations.

But a new study from Duke University law professor Ben Grunwald challenges this narrative. To assess the validity of the claim that officers resigned en masse after the 2020 protests, Grunwald collected data “on every job held by every officer in all 6,800 local law enforcement agencies across fifteen states that, together, cover half the U.S. population.” That database came to encompass over 972,000 officers between the mid-1990s and 2022, though for the study, he focused only on 2011–2021.

Grunwald found that “the increase in separations” among those agencies “after the summer of 2020 was smaller, later, less sudden, and possibly less pervasive than the retention-crisis narrative suggests.”

“Separations were nearly stable in 2020 compared to the year before,” he writes, while “in 2021, separations increased by historically large numbers but substantially less than the most widely reported figures for that period.” Specifically, separations in 2020 increased “by less than 1% compared to 2019” while they “rose far more in 2021, by 18% relative to 2019.” Grunwald notes that while this increase “was historically unusual, larger than any two-year period in the previous decade,” it is also much smaller than the 2021 PERF study suggested, and about one-third of it “can be explained by pre-existing trends that long predate the events of 2020.”

“All told, the cumulative effect on aggregate employment by the end of 2021 was just 1%,” Grunwald concludes. “This was not because of increased lateral mobility [officers transferring to another department or another role within law enforcement], as some have wondered. Rather, [the database] shows that the vast majority of excess separations in 2021 were by officers leaving the field, at least for a while.” He does acknowledge, though, that “a substantial minority of large departments [those with 500 or more officers] were meaningfully hit, losing over 5% of staff by the end of 2021.””

https://reason.com/2024/07/08/study-george-floyd-protests-did-not-cause-mass-exodus-of-police-officers/