Abstract
How do protests affect police responsiveness? Local governments delegate power to the police as the primary overseers of domestic law and order, especially during periods of upheaval. The police themselves can be individual or collective political actors, and both their institutions and street-level behaviors have been the targets of protest movements. This paper analyzes variation in employee absenteeism for members of the Minneapolis Police Department as a function of the prevalence and political issues of local protests. Results show that protest waves can both mobilize and demobilize police officers, depending on the window of time considered. In the long run, policing-issue protests in the summer of 2020 generated significant long-term increases in rates of paid absences among sworn MPD personnel. In the short term, the days of and days immediately following policing protests are associated with a significant decrease in officers’ paid absence rates, indicating greater mobilization at the margins. Civilian personnel’s absence patterns are unchanged by protest occurrences. Of all prominent and recurrent political issues featured at Minneapolis protests between 2017 and 2025, only policing-issue protests persistently cause short-term changes in absenteeism. These results are robust to controlling for blue centered protest characteristics such as crowd size, arrests, injuries, and damages, along with COVID-19 case rates. The results help explain how protest-caused demobilization such as the Blue Flu and work slowdowns can coexist with prior evidence suggesting protests as mobilization mechanisms, with the same protest events both pushing and pulling officers from the front lines.