Assistant Professor of Political Science · University of Michigan
Shea Streeter
I study why some acts of state violence become public movements — and why many others never do.
About
I am a political scientist who studies race, police violence, and the politics of accountability in the United States. My research asks why some police killings ignite protest and demands for justice while others pass in silence. I argue that the answer begins with families and their efforts to make claims on the state after their loved one has been killed. The decisions that grieving families make in the aftermath of a killing — whether to mourn privately or to demand justice publicly — determine when private loss becomes a public movement. This reframing changes how we understand the Black Lives Matter movement and the movement for police accountability, revealing that campaigns for justice and reform have been carried, in large part, on the labor of grieving relatives.
My book project, Claiming Justice: Families and the Movement for Police Accountability, develops and tests this argument. I draw on the Police Killings and Protest (PKAP) dataset, an original resource that documents more than 2,000 police killings and codes each for whether it produced protest. I pair that quantitative evidence with interviews and fieldwork among the families of people killed by police, a population that existing research has rarely reached. Together, these sources let me build a three-part theory of grievance, bandwidth, and broadcast that explains how a single death can become a national cause. I direct the Violence and Policing Lab at Michigan, where a team of graduate and undergraduate researchers helps build and analyze this evidence.
My earlier and ongoing work examines state violence and its political consequences from several angles. In the Journal of Politics, I showed that police kill Black and White Americans under strikingly similar circumstances, which points to African Americans’ more frequent contact with police, rather than differences in the encounters themselves, as the most likely source of the threefold racial disparity in police killings. In Public Opinion Quarterly, my coauthor and I demonstrated that Americans’ judgments about police violence turn on whether they perceive the victim as deserving. In a working paper on the 2020 uprising, my collaborator and I find that a county’s prior protest experience, not its rate of police violence, best predicts whether residents mobilized after George Floyd’s murder. Across these projects, I trace how communities translate — or fail to translate — violence into political action.
Background
I hold a Ph.D. in Political Science from Stanford University and a B.A. in Anthropology from the University of Notre Dame. Before joining the Michigan faculty, I was a President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at Michigan. You can find my publications on Google Scholar, view my CV, or reach me by email.