Dataset Information

Say their names: Resurgence in the collective attention toward Black victims of fatal police violence following the death of George Floyd.

ABSTRACT: The murder of George Floyd by police in May 2020 sparked international protests and brought unparalleled levels of attention to the Black Lives Matter movement. As we show, his death set record levels of activity and amplification on Twitter, prompted the saddest day in the platform's history, and caused his name to appear among the ten most frequently used phrases in a day, where he is the only individual to have ever received that level of attention who was not known to the public earlier that same week. Importantly, we find that the Black Lives Matter movement's rhetorical strategy to connect and repeat the names of past Black victims of police violence-foregrounding racial injustice as an ongoing pattern rather than a singular event-was exceptionally effective following George Floyd's death: attention given to him extended to over 185 prior Black victims, more than other past moments in the movement's history. We contextualize this rising tide of attention among 12 years of racial justice activism on Twitter, demonstrating how activists and allies have used attention and amplification as a recurring tactic to lift and memorialize the names of Black victims of police violence. Our results show how the Black Lives Matter movement uses social media to center past instances of police violence at an unprecedented scale and speed, while still advancing the racial justice movement's longstanding goal to "say their names."

SUBMITTER: Wu HH

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9833594 | biostudies-literature | 2023

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Say their names: Resurgence in the collective attention toward Black victims of fatal police violence following the death of George Floyd.

Wu Henry H HH Gallagher Ryan J RJ Alshaabi Thayer T Adams Jane L JL Minot Joshua R JR Arnold Michael V MV Welles Brooke Foucault BF Harp Randall R Dodds Peter Sheridan PS Danforth Christopher M CM

PloS one 20230111 1

The murder of George Floyd by police in May 2020 sparked international protests and brought unparalleled levels of attention to the Black Lives Matter movement. As we show, his death set record levels of activity and amplification on Twitter, prompted the saddest day in the platform's history, and caused his name to appear among the ten most frequently used phrases in a day, where he is the only individual to have ever received that level of attention who was not known to the public earlier that ...[more]

PMID: 36630354

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Project description:BackgroundExposure to fatal police violence may play a role in population-level inequities in risk for preterm delivery.ObjectiveTo evaluate whether exposure to fatal police violence during pregnancy affects the hazard of preterm delivery and whether associations differ by race/ethnicity and fetal sex.MethodsWe leveraged temporal variation in incidents of fatal police violence within census tracts to assess whether occurrence of fatal police violence in a person's tract during pregnancy was associated with increased hazard of extremely (20-27 weeks), early (28-31 weeks), moderate (32-33 weeks), and late (32-36 weeks) preterm delivery in California from 2007 to 2015. We used both death records and the Fatal Encounters database to identify incidents of fatal police violence. We estimated hazard ratios (HR) using time-varying Cox proportional hazard models stratified by census tract, controlling for age, race/ethnicity, educational attainment, health insurance type, parity, and the year and season of conception. We further stratified by race/ethnicity and infant sex to evaluate whether there were differential effects by these characteristics.ResultsExposure to an incident of fatal police violence was associated with a small increase in the hazard of late preterm birth using both the death records (N = 376,029; hazard ratio [HR] 1.05, 95% confidence interval [CI] 1.00, 1.10) and the Fatal Encounters data (N = 938,814; HR 1.03, 95% CI 1.00, 1.06). We also observed an association for moderate preterm birth in the Fatal Encounters data (HR 1.06, 95% CI 0.98, 1.15). We did not observe associations for early or extremely preterm birth in either data source. Larger relative hazards of moderate (HR 1.25, 95% CI 0.93, 1.68) and late preterm delivery (HR 1.18, 95% CI 1.05, 1.33) were observed among Black birth parents with female births in the Fatal Encounters data.ConclusionsPreventing police use of lethal force may reduce preterm delivery in communities where such violence occurs.

Project description:BACKGROUND & METHODS:Recent social movements have highlighted fatal police violence as an enduring public health problem in the United States. To solve it, the public requires basic information, such as understanding where rates of fatal police violence are particularly high, and for which groups. Existing mapping efforts, though critically important, often use inappropriate statistical methods and can produce misleading, unstable rates when denominators are small. To fill this gap, we use inverse-variance-weighted multilevel models to estimate overall and race-stratified rates of fatal police violence for all Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) in the U.S. (2013-2017), as well as racial inequities in these rates. We analyzed the most recent, reliable data from Fatal Encounters, a citizen science initiative that aggregates and verifies media reports. RESULTS:Rates of police-related fatalities varied dramatically, with the deadliest MSAs exhibiting rates nine times those of the least deadly. Overall rates in Southwestern MSAs were highest, with lower rates in the northern Midwest and Northeast. Yet this pattern was reversed for Black-White inequities, with Northeast and Midwest MSAs exhibiting the highest inequities nationwide. Our main results excluded deaths that could be considered accidents (e.g., vehicular collisions), but sensitivity analyses demonstrated that doing so may underestimate the rate of fatal police violence in some MSAs by 60%. Black-White and Latinx-White inequities were slightly underestimated nationally by excluding reportedly 'accidental' deaths, but MSA-specific inequities were sometimes severely under- or over-estimated. CONCLUSIONS:Preventing fatal police violence in different areas of the country will likely require unique solutions. Estimates of the severity of these problems (overall rates, racial inequities, specific causes of death) in any given MSA are quite sensitive to which types of deaths are analyzed, and whether race and cause of death are attributed correctly. Monitoring and mapping these rates using appropriate methods is critical for government accountability and successful prevention.

Project description:BackgroundThe burden of fatal police violence is an urgent public health crisis in the USA. Mounting evidence shows that deaths at the hands of the police disproportionately impact people of certain races and ethnicities, pointing to systemic racism in policing. Recent high-profile killings by police in the USA have prompted calls for more extensive and public data reporting on police violence. This study examines the presence and extent of under-reporting of police violence in US Government-run vital registration data, offers a method for correcting under-reporting in these datasets, and presents revised estimates of deaths due to police violence in the USA.MethodsWe compared data from the USA National Vital Statistics System (NVSS) to three non-governmental, open-source databases on police violence: Fatal Encounters, Mapping Police Violence, and The Counted. We extracted and standardised the age, sex, US state of death registration, year of death, and race and ethnicity (non-Hispanic White, non-Hispanic Black, non-Hispanic of other races, and Hispanic of any race) of each decedent for all data sources and used a network meta-regression to quantify the rate of under-reporting within the NVSS. Using these rates to inform correction factors, we provide adjusted estimates of deaths due to police violence for all states, ages, sexes, and racial and ethnic groups from 1980 to 2019 across the USA.FindingsAcross all races and states in the USA, we estimate 30 800 deaths (95% uncertainty interval [UI] 30 300-31 300) from police violence between 1980 and 2018; this represents 17 100 more deaths (16 600-17 600) than reported by the NVSS. Over this time period, the age-standardised mortality rate due to police violence was highest in non-Hispanic Black people (0·69 [95% UI 0·67-0·71] per 100 000), followed by Hispanic people of any race (0·35 [0·34-0·36]), non-Hispanic White people (0·20 [0·19-0·20]), and non-Hispanic people of other races (0·15 [0·14- 0·16]). This variation is further affected by the decedent's sex and shows large discrepancies between states. Between 1980 and 2018, the NVSS did not report 55·5% (54·8-56·2) of all deaths attributable to police violence. When aggregating all races, the age-standardised mortality rate due to police violence was 0·25 (0·24-0·26) per 100 000 in the 1980s and 0·34 (0·34-0·35) per 100 000 in the 2010s, an increase of 38·4% (32·4-45·1) over the period of study.InterpretationWe found that more than half of all deaths due to police violence that we estimated in the USA from 1980 to 2018 were unreported in the NVSS. Compounding this, we found substantial differences in the age-standardised mortality rate due to police violence over time and by racial and ethnic groups within the USA. Proven public health intervention strategies are needed to address these systematic biases. State-level estimates allow for appropriate targeting of these strategies to address police violence and improve its reporting.FundingBill & Melinda Gates Foundation, National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, and National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.

Dataset Information

Say their names: Resurgence in the collective attention toward Black victims of fatal police violence following the death of George Floyd.

Publications

Say their names: Resurgence in the collective attention toward Black victims of fatal police violence following the death of George Floyd.

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