Fear of the Police: Evidence from Student Protests* Felipe Gonzalez,´ Pontificia Universidad Cat´olicade Chile Mounu Prem, Universidad del Rosario We study the protest behavior of teenagers linked to a student killed by a stray bullet coming from a policeman in Chile. We use ad- ministrative data to follow the schoolmates of the victim and those living nearby the shooting in hundreds of protest and non-protest days. We find that police violence causes lower protest partici- pation in street rallies but more adherence to test boycotts. These effects appear among schoolmates of the victim and not among stu- dents living nearby the killing. Negative educational consequences suffered by the schoolmates combined with previous results sug- gest that psychological mechanisms are a plausible explanation. Keywords: police, violence, protest, students. *June 2021. We would like to thank Josefa Aguirre, Jose´ Ignacio Cuesta, Bruno Ferman, Marc Rockmore, Nicolas´ Rojas, Ignacio Silva, Danae Valenzuela, Noam Yuchtman and seminar participants at NEUDC, PUC-Chile, and Uni- versidad del Rosario for comments and suggestions. We also thank Carolina Bernal, Katia Everke, Anita Zaldivar, and Catalina Zambrano for outstanding research assistance. Corresponding author email:
[email protected]. I. Introduction State violence is routinely used to ensure public safety (Atkinson and Stiglitz, 2015). Some schol- ars argue that it prevents unlawful actions (Acemoglu and Robinson, 2000, 2001; Besley and Pers- son, 2011), while others emphasize that it can spark dissident behavior (Davenport, 2007; Passarelli and Tabellini, 2017).1 The consequences are likely to depend on the relative magnitude of feelings of fear and anger around the victims (Aytac et al., 2018).