Republicans are trying to make Black Lives Matter the boogieman to cover up the violence on their side. Unfortunately, fact-based data says otherwise.
Black Lives Matter responsible for almost no property damage
Here is what the Washington Post concluded about Black Lives Matter.
When the Department of Homeland Security released its Homeland Threat Assessment last week, it emphasized that self-proclaimed white supremacist groups are the most dangerous threat to U.S. security. But the report misleadingly added that there had been “over 100 days of violence and destruction in our cities,” referring to the anti-racism uprisings of this past summer.
In fact, the Black Lives Matter uprisings were remarkably nonviolent. When there was violence, very often police or counterprotesters were reportedly directing it at the protesters.
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We make two assumptions. First, when politicians and officials categorize the protests as violent, they are usually envisioning property destruction or interpersonal violence in which they infer that BLM protesters are attacking police, bystanders and property.
Second, using several measures to evaluate protest behavior offers a better assessment than the blanket term “violence.” For example, we disaggregate property destruction from interpersonal violence. We analyze separately the number of injuries or deaths among protesters and police. And we are thinking about how gathering even finer-grained data in the future could help further assign precise responsibility for violent acts.
The data on those protests shows very little violence
Here is what we have found based on the 7,305 events we’ve collected. The overall levels of violence and property destruction were low, and most of the violence that did take place was, in fact, directed against the BLM protesters.
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