Examining the effects of the killing of George Floyd by police in the United States on attitudes of Black Londoners: a replication

Abstract

High-profile incidents of police misconduct can have serious consequences for public trust in the police. A recent study in the British Journal of Political Science found that Eric Garner’s death in NYC lead to more negative attitudes towards the police in London among Black residents compared to White and Asian residents. The current study aimed to replicate this transnational effect by assessing the impact of George Floyd’s death on Londoners’ perceptions of police. Using the same data and methodological approach, we did not replicate the immediate effect on Black Londoners’ attitudes. We did find that attitudes across ethnic groups became more negative when using a wider temporal bandwidth. However, we discovered violations to the excludability assumption, meaning we cannot be certain that the effect is solely due to the murder of George Floyd, or at least partly due to different dynamics, like the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and the accompanying policies. This means that while it is possible that police killings in other contexts play a role in shaping attitudes towards local police, these effects are difficult to disentangle from other global and local factors.