Traversing the Rural/Urban Divide: How Community Context Impacts Racialized Policing and Social Movement Response

Abstract

For the past decade, over 1,000 civilians have been killed by police in the US annually, with these killings disproportionately impacting Black Americans. When it comes to police use of lethal force, estimates suggest that nearly 28% of the police killings that occurred in 2020 involved a Black victim, even though Blacks comprise only 13% of the US population. Further, almost all the research on racial inequality, police brutality, and civilians killed by the police has focused on the largest cities in the US. This is a major oversight, given that over half of all fatal police shootings occur in jurisdictions with fewer than 50,000 residents. Further, this widespread and continued racially disparate treatment by police sparked the largest social movement in the country's history, as 'Black Lives Matter' and 'Defund the Police' became national rallying cries across the nation in 2020, demanding accountability and police reform. Little scholarly attention has been paid to the effects of these protests on subsequent lethal police violence, and nearly no studies have considered how this protest movement may be differentially experienced among rural communities. Using county-level analyses, the current study examines whether theoretical predictors for lethal police violence are moderated by urban vs. rural context, examines lethal police violence before and after the death of George Floyd, and explores whether the effects of protest activity are contingent on rurality. Findings reveal differential risk factors, protest engagement, and killing outcomes across the urban-rural divide, suggesting that future studies should expand the focus of this literature beyond the largest urban centers.