Journal of Race, Ethnicity and Politics
Examining How Narratives of Events Change Attitudes or Motivate Political Participation: The Case of Police Violence
2026-01-19
Media attention to policing has brought a proliferation of narratives seeking to contextualize incidents of police violence. Here, we test whether exposure to such narratives shift Americans’ opinion or behavior. To do so, we first identify and track the media prevalence of two of these narratives: one focused on racial bias in policing and a second focused on the dangers of the profession. Despite the presence of these narratives in media, we find, experimentally, that public opinion about police violence is stable, regardless of the media narrative used. Finally, to better understand these null results, we use a content analysis of open-ended responses to uncover the demographic and ideological characteristics that are most more deterministic of their reactions to police violence. Altogether, these findings indicate attitudes about policing and planned political participation are ossified and unresponsive to media narratives.