Trust in police declined among Black Chicago residents after Jacob Blake shooting

Strongest declines were seen among younger residents and those previously arrested or incarcerated

2024-09-11

(Press-News.org) Survey data collected from Chicago, Illinois at the time of the 2020 police shooting of Jacob Blake in nearby Wisconsin shows that trust in police plummeted among Black residents after the shooting. Jonathan Ben-Menachem and Gerard Torrats-Espinosa of Columbia University in New York, U.S., present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on September 11, 2024.

For young minority men in the U.S., police violence has become a leading cause of death. Prior research has explored how police violence and misconduct might reduce trust in police, but most studies have been limited in their ability to explore how trust might vary with individual factors such as age, race, or prior arrest.

On August 23, 2020, police officer Rusten Sheskey shot unarmed, 29-year-old Black man Jacob Blake in the back, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down. A viral video of the shooting sparked widespread protests. At the time, the Chicago Department of Public Health was in the midst of conducting a survey broadly evaluating residents’ health, which included questions about trust in law enforcement.

Ben-Menachem and Torrats-Espinosa recognized that the overlapping timing of the shooting and the survey could enable a quasi-experimental statistical analysis comparing how trust in police may have differed in the four weeks leading up to versus the four weeks following the shooting. Their dataset consisted of 584 Black and 939 white Chicago residents.

They found that, during the two weeks after the shooting, trust in police among Black residents declined by 31 percent overall. Declines were particularly pronounced for Black adults aged 18 to 44 and among Black residents who had previously experienced arrest or incarceration. Meanwhile, trust among white residents was relatively unchanged.

Further analysis showed that these results held true even when considering the possible influence of COVID-19 pandemic policies or the shootings perpetrated by Kyle Rittenhouse in Kenosha in the aftermath of the Jacob Blake shooting.

While further research is needed, these findings deepen understanding of how police violence may influence perceptions of law enforcement, perhaps exacerbating public safety issues.

The authors add: “Although other studies have shown that high-profile police violence can change residents' perceptions of police, we found these changes were most pronounced among three groups: Black residents, young people, and those who had previously been arrested or charged with a crime.”

#####

In your coverage please use this URL to provide access to the freely available article in PLOS ONE: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0308487

Citation: Ben-Menachem J, Torrats-Espinosa G (2024) Police violence reduces trust in the police among Black residents. PLoS ONE 19(9): e0308487. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0308487

Author Countries: USA

Funding: The author(s) received no specific funding for this work.

END

[Attachments] See images for this press release:

Trust in police declined among Black Chicago residents after Jacob Blake shooting 2

Trust in police declined among Black Chicago residents after Jacob Blake shooting 3

ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

Quitting smoking reduces risk of atrial fibrillation

2024-09-11

Quitting cigarettes can significantly lower a person’s risk of atrial fibrillation (AFib) compared to those who continue to smoke, according to a study published today in JACC: Clinical Electrophysiology. The findings show that the benefits of quitting start right away, suggesting that it is possible to reverse the risk of negative health outcomes. “The findings provide a compelling new reason to show current smokers that it’s not too late to quit and that having smoked in the past doesn’t ...

How many people have A-Fib? Three times more than we thought

2024-09-11

Atrial fibrillation, a rapid, irregular heart beat that can lead to stroke or sudden death, is three times more common than previously thought, affecting nearly 5% of the population, or 10.5 million U.S. adults, according to new estimates from UC San Francisco. A-Fib, as the condition is commonly known, has been on the rise for at least the past decade, driven by the aging of the population, along with increasing rates of hypertension, diabetes and obesity. Earlier projections had estimated that 3.3 million U.S. adults ...

Groundbreaking achievement: NSF Daniel K. Inouye solar telescope produces its first magnetic field maps of the sun’s corona

2024-09-11

Summary: The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, the world’s most powerful solar telescope, operated by the NSF National Solar Observatory (NSO), achieved a major breakthrough in solar physics by successfully producing its first detailed maps of the Sun’s coronal magnetic fields. This milestone, led by NSO Associate Astronomer Dr. Tom Schad, was recently published in Science Advances, and promises to enhance our understanding of the Sun's atmosphere and how its changing conditions lead to impacts on Earth's technology-dependent society. The corona, or the Sun’s ...

Landmark study reveals how antibiotics contribute to inflammatory bowel disease risk

2024-09-11

In a landmark study published today in Science Advances, Dr. Shai Bel and his research team at the Azrieli Faculty of Medicine of Bar-Ilan University have uncovered crucial insights into how antibiotic use increases the risk of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). The study demonstrates that antibiotics interfere with the protective mucus layer in the intestine, a discovery that could reshape our understanding of antibiotic effects and IBD development. IBD, which includes Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, affects approximately 1% of the global population. This debilitating condition is ...

Neuromorphic platform presents huge leap forward in computing efficiency 

2024-09-11

In a landmark advancement, researchers at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) have developed a brain-inspired analog computing platform capable of storing and processing data in an astonishing 16,500 conductance states within a molecular film. Published today in the journal Nature, this breakthrough represents a huge step forward over traditional digital computers in which data storage and processing are limited to just two states.  Such a platform could potentially bring complex AI tasks, like training Large Language Models (LLMs), to ...

Genetics of dementia in African and underrepresented populations presented

2024-09-11

Regions of the genome associated with Alzheimer’s disease and dementia in African populations will be presented at the Future of Dementia in Africa conference on September 11-12, 2024. The studies highlight discrepancies compared to Caucasian populations and underscore that a lack of diversity in genomic studies potentially limits the effectiveness of targeted therapies across diverse populations. The Future of Dementia in Africa conference will take place at the J.W. Marriott Hotel in Nairobi, Kenya. It is a Nature Conference, ...

Turning seawater into fresh water through solar power

2024-09-11

Researchers at the University of Waterloo have designed an energy-efficient device that produces drinking water from seawater using an evaporation process driven largely by the sun. Desalination is critical for many coastal and island nations to provide access to fresh water, given water scarcity concerns due to rapid population growth and increasing global water consumption. Roughly 2.2 billion people worldwide have no access to clean water, emphasizing the urgent need for new technologies to generate fresh water, according to the UN World Water Development Report 2024. Current desalination systems pump seawater through membranes to ...

How the oceans’ most abundant bacteria impact global nutrient flows

2024-09-11

If you were to collect all the organisms from the ocean surface down to 200 meters, you’d find that SAR11 bacteria, though invisible to the naked eye, would make up a fifth of the total biomass. These bacteria, also known as Pelagibacterales, have evolved to thrive in nutrient-poor marine environments and play a significant role in global nutrient cycles. Despite their importance, the mechanisms behind their impact on the planetary ecosystem have remained unclear. But now, a recent Nature paper by researchers from the Okinawa ...

Discovery of a new phase of matter in 2D which defies normal statistical mechanics

2024-09-11

Physicists from the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge have created the first two-dimensional version of the Bose glass, a novel phase of matter that challenges statistical mechanics. The details of the study have been published in Nature. As the name suggests, the Bose glass has some glassy properties and within it all particles are localised. This means that each particle in the system sticks to itself, not mixing with its neighbours. If coffee was localised, then when stirring milk into the coffee, the intricate pattern of black and white stripes would remain forever, instead of washing out to an average. To create this new phase of matter, the group overlapped several laser ...

Genes with strong impact on menopause timing also link to cancer risk

2024-09-11

New research has found four genes with some of the largest known effects on the timing of menopause discovered to date, providing new insight into links between menopause timing and cancer risk. Genes come in pairs, and when women only have one working copy of the four new genes identified (ETAA1, ZNF518A, PNPLA8, PALB2), they have menopause between two and five-and-a-half years earlier than average. Published in Nature, the large-scale analysis was funded by the Medical Research Council and Wellcome. The team first looked at variation in data from genetic sequencing of 106,973 post-menopausal ...

Trust in police declined among Black Chicago residents after Jacob Blake shooting

ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES: