Counting Crowds in an Era of Protest: UConn Professor Gathers Data To Quantify What’s Happening

Perhaps no other year since 1968 will be remembered more for its public protests than 2020.  The increase in such visible activism, in the wake of growing outrage at the deaths of Blacks at the hands of law enforcement, have, along with COVID-19 and the presidential election year, dominated the news and public discourse.

What has been largely absent has been data to quantify what has been happening.  Enter a University of Connecticut researcher.

Associate Professor of Political Science Jeremy Pressman, who has been at UConn since 2003, is co-founder of the Crowd Counting Consortium (CCC), which collects publicly available data on political crowds reported in the United States, including marches, protests, strikes, demonstrations, riots, and other actions.

The CCC findings, outlined recently in UConn Today, have been updated in a series of stories in “The Monkey Cage” blog at The Washington Post, which describes its goal as using the discipline of political science to “make sense of the circus that is politics.”

While the summer of 2020 experienced 100 days of violence and destruction in cities, according to the the U.S Department of Homeland Security, the most recent CCC study of 7,305 separate events in May and June suggests that 96.3% of events involved no property damage or police injuries and 97.7% of events had no injuries reported, according to the publication.

Pressman told UConn Today that the information he has gathered “tells us that there is often a difference between reality and perception. At different times in the last few months, the protests have been a dominant story in the news and in the political sphere. How politicians and media want to treat the protest isn’t necessarily always what’s happening on the ground. One of the reasons we want to collect the data is to get a grounded sense of what’s going on instead of just a scripted view of what people are being told is happening.”

The CCC website points out that “Various activists and movements have been interrupted by the arrival of this pandemic and are learning how to adapt and continue their work of organizing (and mobilizing) for mutual aid, community support, and social and political change. Others are resisting attempts to manage the public health crisis through social distancing.”

“To a certain extent we are witnessing the formation of movements and counter-movements across the globe, all of which are operating under quite restrictive circumstances that are nevertheless providing opportunities for the innovation of novel methods of dissent. So far, there does not appear to be a source for accumulating collective wisdom and information about these methods.”

The UConn professor also pointed to what he described as “the geographic scope of this, (which) is really incredible. The antiracism protests took place in big cities, medium sized cities, small towns, urban areas, suburban areas, and rural areas. It took place in blue states, red states, purple states. This was really a societal phenomenon.”

He added that “the size and the scope of it was just really quite stunning and important. We’ve seen a little bit of that before for instance, after Parkland, with some of the school walkouts, but this spring and summer was really striking.”

Collaborators in the CCC initiative include Erica Chenoweth, Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, Felipe G. Satos and Jay Ulfelder, along with nearly a dozen volunteers. 

Pressman also highlighted the role of youth in the protests of recent months, and the growing impact of the Black Lives Matter movement.  Youth involvement, he explained, is “not surprising because youth have been playing a major leadership role in recent movements on Black lives, gun reform, and climate issues. I don’t think we can understand what’s happened here in the summer of 2020 unless we go back to the death of Trayvon Martin, the Ferguson protests, and the Black Lives Matter movement that’s been growing. I don’t think we can understand what happened in 2020 without understanding also how Black Lives Matter built towards this in terms of organization and ideas.

He also points out that the impact of protests cannot be underestimated.

“I think what the research suggests is that protests can have dramatic effects on public policy, opinion, and elections in a direction sympathetic to that of the protesters, whatever the movement is –whether that’s the Tea Party a decade ago or whether it’s Black Lives Matter in 2020. The research backs that up.”

“It pushes back against a certain cynicism that you hear sometimes that protests are just people shouting in the streets and don’t matter. What’s the difference? Well, the research demonstrates that it does make a difference. It energizes people, it brings people into the process. People organize. It gives opportunities for constituents to voice their concerns on their issues to their elected representatives. I think the research results have undermined that more cynical view of protest

CCC continues to seek information on protests.  Individuals can provide information online, here.

Pressman has been conducting crowd counting research since January 2017, which is a period of major social mobilization – the Women’s Marches, March for Our Lives, Black Lives Matter, March for Science.

“It has been a period of incredible social upheaval and political protests,” he points out. “That’s the first thing that we’ve observed and really documented for the public and for scholarly use. I think the amount of data that we’ve collected is exciting, now tens of thousands of protests across these years, but I think it will be even more exciting when we’re comparing across different presidential administrations.”

While not all issues that engender protests make the daily news feeds, Pressman has been impressed by the wide range of issues on which Americans protest.

“The example I’ve used in Connecticut is the example of people protesting because of faulty concrete used in their basement foundation. That is not the kind of hot button issue that makes the top of the news nationally and gets people marching on Washington, but that is important to people.”

“I’m quite struck in looking across thousands and thousands of protests – not just the ones that get all the national attention – the way a protest as a political tool is so ingrained in certain parts of our body politic. People turn to it on issues that might not be the first issue you think of when you think of protests.

CCC relies only on publicly-reported incidents, which have already been published in the news media or on publicly-available social media accounts. The database, they note, therefore only includes links to stories or posts where people have already consented to being identified.