The effect that different police protest management methods have on protesters' physical and mental trauma is still not well understood and is a matter of debate. In this paper, we take a two-pronged approach to gain insight into this issue. First, we perform statistical analysis on time series data of protests provided by ACLED and spanning the period of time from January 1, 2020, until March 13, 2021. We observe that the use of kinetic impact projectiles is associated with more protests in subsequent days and is also a better predictor of the number of deaths in subsequent deaths than the number of protests, concluding that the use of non-lethal weapons seems to have an inflammatory rather than suppressive effect on protests. Next, we provide a mathematical framework to model modern, but well-established psychological and sociological research on compliance theory and crowd dynamics. Our results show that understanding the heterogeneity of the crowd is key for protests that lead to a reduction of social tension and minimization of physical and mental trauma in protesters.

翻译：不同的警方抗议管理方式对抗议者身心创伤的影响至今尚未充分明确，且存在广泛争议。本文采用双轨分析框架探究该问题：首先，基于ACLED提供的2020年1月1日至2021年3月13日期间抗议活动时间序列数据开展统计分析。研究发现，动能冲击弹的使用与后续数日抗议活动增加存在相关性，且相较于抗议活动数量，该变量对后续死亡人数的预测效力更强，由此推断非致命性武器的使用对抗议活动呈现"激化效应"而非"抑制效应"。其次，我们构建了数学框架，对当代公认的心理学与社会学理论（包括服从理论与群体动力学）进行建模。研究结果表明，理解人群异质性是实现降低社会张力、最小化抗议者身心创伤的关键。