Abstract
Since the Black Lives Matter movement’s rise to prominence, there has been significant opposition from both media and political figures who believe that the movement is promoting a “war on cops.” Because there is no evidence to support this claim, the current study examines the basis for negative attitudes towards Black Lives Matter using a sample of over 500 undergraduate students from a large Midwestern university. The findings indicate that the strongest predictors of negative attitudes towards Black Lives Matter are being white and holding symbolically racist attitudes. Perceiving the police to be equivalent to soldiers in a war on crime, perceiving police misconduct to be less common, and holding a conservative crime ideology are also significant in the model.
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09 September 2020
A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12103-020-09568-8
Notes
It is worth noting that African Americans are the most dominant minority group in the city, comprising approximately 44.8% of the population, while Hispanic and Asian Americans comprise 2.8% and 1.8%, respectively.
Traditionally, the conservative crime ideology scale has eleven items (Dunaway and Cullen 1991), all of which were included in the survey. Using exploratory factor analysis with varimax rotation, we found that nine of the conservative crime ideology items loaded onto one factor and two of them loaded onto a second factor with the four “attitudes toward ‘the policed’” measures. The nine items that loaded onto the first factor were summed to create the conservative crime ideology scale for this study. The remaining two were omitted from the study because they dealt with attitudes toward people and society instead of support for more punitive criminal justice policies.
At the suggestion of a reviewer, we attempted to estimate the model using ordinal regression, but the test of parallel lines was significant, meaning that the model did not meet the assumption of proportional odds, and thus, ordinal regression cannot be used.
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The original version of this article was revised: Due to typesetting mistake, the last two rows of Table 6 were misaligned.
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Ilchi, O.S., Frank, J. Supporting the Message, Not the Messenger: The Correlates of Attitudes towards Black Lives Matter. Am J Crim Just 46, 377–398 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12103-020-09561-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12103-020-09561-1