I find myself surprised by the noticeable decline in the fervor surrounding activism against policy violence towards Black people from its peak in the summer of 2020 to the subsequent years of 2021 through 2023. Initially, I had anticipated that demands for increased use of body cams would result in the surfacing of more videos documenting the maltreatment of Black individuals by law enforcement officers, inevitably spurring more protests.
To attempt to make sense of this, I have considered several hypotheses:
- FBI Infiltration: The FBI may have successfully infiltrated activist networks, consequently dismantling their internal structure and hindering their ability to organize.
- Improved Law Enforcement Conduct: Police officers might have made significant changes to their behavior, thus reducing the chances of any controversial incidents being captured on camera.
- Shift in Mainstream Media Focus: The mainstream media, which previously stoked the flames of protest during the Trump administration, might have lost interest under Biden’s administration, leading to a reduction in protest activities.
- Democratic Influence: Democratic organizers may have found that the ‘defund-the-police’ activism was polling poorly, leading to concerted efforts to tone it down.
- Misallocation of BLM Funds: Perhaps there’s been some level of corruption within the BLM movement, with funds being directed towards personal extravagances instead of being allocated for organizing protests.
- Lack of Organic Support: Unlike the sustained energy seen in movements like the Tea Party, the impetus behind these protests might have been primarily media-driven, evaporating once the media’s interest waned.
- Successful Reforms: Maybe there have been enough successful reforms in the policy violence sphere, leading people to feel less need to advocate for the cause.
While these are speculative theories, I’m curious hear from those who were less surprised by this development. I’m interested in understanding what you perceive to be the primary factors behind this trend.
I’d add “Covid” to the hypotheses. At the time it was difficult to sustain many varieties of coordinated grassroots activity, even something as banal as a book club, just because you didn’t want to meet indoors in groups and because alternatives like Zoom were off-putting to some and suboptimal in many ways. People may have relished the opportunity to come out in the streets and protest a bit, or to engage in social media histrionics, but to sustain this sort of activism in a meaningful way requires the sort of organizing and group deliberation that was unusually difficult at that time.