The police in the United States are three times more likely to use force against left-wing protesters than against right-wing protesters, according to new data from a non-profit organization that monitors political violence around the world.
In the past 10 months, U.S. law enforcement agencies have used tear gas, pepper spray, rubber bullets and beatings to a much greater extent in Black Lives Matter demonstrations than in pro-Trump or other right-wing protests.
Police officers were also more likely to use force against left-wing protesters, whether the protests remained peaceful or not.
The statistics, based on law enforcement responses to more than 13,000 protests in the United States since April 2020, show a clear disparity in how agencies responded to the historic wave of Black Lives Matter protests against police violence, compared to demonstrations organized by Trump supporters.
Barack Obama highlighted a previous version of these statistics on January 8, arguing that they provided a “useful frame of reference” to understand Americans’ outrage over the failure of the Capitol police to prevent a crowd of thousands of white Trump supporters from invading and looting the Capitol on January 6 , a response that has led to renewed scrutiny of the level of violence and aggression that American police forces use against black and white Americans.
The new statistics come from the US Crisis Monitor, a database created this spring by Princeton researchers and the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED) project, a non-profit organization that has already monitored civil unrest in the Middle East, Europe and America Latin.
The researchers found that the vast majority of the thousands of protests in the United States last year were peaceful, and that most protests from both the left and right did not find a violent response from the authorities.
Police used tear gas, rubber bullets, beatings with batons and other forces against protesters in 511 left and 33 right protests since April, according to updated data released this week.
The Guardian compared the percentage of all demonstrations organized by left and right groups that resulted in the use of force by law enforcement. For left-wing demonstrations, this was about 4.7% of protests, while for right-wing demonstrations, it was about 1.4%, meaning that law enforcement was about three times more likely to use force against left versus right protests.
The disparity in the police response only grew when we compared peaceful protests from the left and right. Looking at the subset of protests in which the protesters were not involved in any violence, vandalism or looting, police officers were about 3.5 times more likely to use force against leftist protests than right-wing protests, with about 1.8% of peaceful left protests and only half a percent of peaceful right protests were met with tear gas, rubber bullets or another police force.
“The police are not just getting more involved because [leftwing protesters] are more violent. They are getting even more involved with peaceful protesters, ”said Dr. Roudabeh Kishi, ACLED’s director of research and innovation, to the Guardian. “This is a clear trend.”
ACLED data also shows that US law enforcement agencies were more likely to intervene in left versus right protests in general, and more likely to use force when they intervened. American law enforcement agencies arrested or made other interventions in 9% of the 10,863 Black Lives Matter and other leftist protests between April 1, 2020 and January 8, compared with just 4% of the 2,295 right-wing protests.
Half of the times that the police made any intervention in a left-wing protest involved the use of violent force, ACLED found, compared to only about a third of the time in right-wing protests.
Overall, 94% of left-wing demonstrations in the past ten months were peaceful, compared with 96% of right-wing demonstrations, according to the most recently updated data from ACLED. Kishi warned that the process of categorizing the demonstrations as peaceful did not take into account whether the protesters who were involved in the violence or damage to property were responding to aggressive or violent police behavior.
The US Crisis Monitor previously found that despite Trump’s rhetoric and intense media coverage of property damage or violence during protests this summer against police violence, more than 93% of Black Lives Matter protests since April have not involved damage to people or property.
Most of the ACLED protests categorized as leftist were Black Lives Matter demonstrations, but they also included pro-Biden demonstrations; protests by left-wing groups such as Abolish ICE, NAACP or Democratic Socialists of America; and protests associated with anti-fascist groups or leftist militias and street movements.
Right-wing protests included pro-Trump and pro-police demonstrations, including “Blue Lives Matter” demonstrations; right-wing protests against public health restrictions against the coronavirus; protests involving QAnon conspiracy theorists and others associated with the “Save Our Children” movement; and the “Stop the Steal” rallies promoting Trump’s false claims about his defeat in the 2020 elections.