Police Power and Race Riots. Cathy Lisa Schneider
these are usually opportunistic encounters and not central activities. Most participants attack only property. These uprisings include elements of what Charles Tilly has labeled “broken negotiations,” “scattered attacks,” and “opportunism”—that is, violent reactions to transgressions or violations of unwritten (or written) social pacts or agreements; symbolic and other attacks on property (weapons of the weak); and taking advantage of disorder either to improve one’s material standing or to wreak revenge.117 As in other forms of violence, riots ensue when “actors on at least one side respond by engaging in coordinated attacks on sites across the boundary while those on the other side engage in defense against those attacks.”118 Although property damage in such riots can run high, most deaths result from police killings. In the 1960s, as Thomas Sugrue notes, “Only a handful of cities—notably, Detroit, Newark and Los Angeles—accounted for nearly all the deaths. And, most of the casualties were the result of law enforcement actions against blacks, not black violence against the police or white bystanders.”119
The term “riot” is also used to describe forms of violence having little resemblance to the typical ghetto riot, other than activated categorical boundaries and violent transgressions across those boundaries. Rampages by dominant groups against stigmatized minorities, commonly called race riots, are closer to pogroms. They are usually either instigated or protected by the police, such as the white riot in 1900 in New York, which was set off after a black man stabbed a white off-duty policeman, and the anti-immigrant riot in Vitry, France, in 1977, instigated by the Communist mayor. Other examples include the smaller anti-immigrant riots in Germany in the 1990s.120 Similarly, large-scale interethnic riots, with their extremely high death tolls, more closely fit what Charles Tilly has called coordinated destruction.121 The defining feature of coordinated destruction in addition to activated boundaries is that at least one side employs specialists in violence and includes powerful, well-connected people willing to use lethal violence to acquire or maintain control over valued resources and/or extend their jurisdiction over territory. “The communities are organized only along intra-ethnic lines and the interconnections with other communities are very weak or even nonexistent,” Ashutosh Varshney similarly observes, making “ethnic violence … quite likely.”122 The most deadly are those between groups with significant size and long-standing grievances, such as those between Hindus and Muslims in Asia. If only one side includes violence specialists, the conflict may become genocide. Donald Horowitz, one of the world’s experts on such conflicts, does not believe that ghetto uprisings should be called riots at all, given how dissimilar they are in form and content to these violent conflagrations.123
Some ghetto riots include aspects of interethnic riots, as when minority groups attack members of other minority groups or, more uncommonly, members of the dominant majority. Some interethnic conflict between blacks and Koreans in the course of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, for instance, may have been motivated by a Korean grocer’s killing of a fifteen-year-old African American girl a year before the riot and the white judge’s decision (a week before the Rodney King verdict) to reduce the jury’s recommendation for a sixteen-year sentence for manslaughter to a five-month suspended sentence and five-hundred-dollar fine. Yet, even here only two Asians were killed and most rioters attacked property rather than individuals. In most ghetto riots the boundary activated is not interethnic but rather drawn between stigmatized minorities (both blacks and Latinos in the United States and blacks, Arabs, and Berbers in France) and the state. Police, the only specialists in violence, do the bulk of the killings.
Ghetto riots often include elements of opportunism, as disorder opens up possibilities for personal profit.124 As Tilly observes, individuals “looted when they saw that law enforcement had disappeared and that store owners had lost control over their premises.”125 One woman told an interviewer during the 1965 Watts riot, “Well, you could see all the stuff lying there and all those people going in and out and somebody was going to take it, so I thought I might as well take it for myself.”126 Another, churchgoing woman put it this way: “It dawned on me as I was passing a certain store that I had been paying for my present television for five years and [therefore] the store owed me five televisions. So I got three and I believe the store still owes me two.”127 A self-identified looter in Detroit in 1967 told Nathan Caplan that the blacks were “trying to get the goods from the white folks because the white folks own everything and they [blacks] were just trying to get something so they can own it.”128 Even in opportunistic looting, as Tilly notes, activated racial boundaries divided “the overwhelmingly black looters and fire bombers from the overwhelmingly white fire and police departments.”129
Opportunity alone rarely leads to riots. Where there is a long-standing pattern of police abuse of stigmatized minorities, however, a sudden decline in the state’s repressive capacity may spark riots. As with other forms of collective action, the order and magnitude of threat and opportunity lead to different patterns of mobilization. Robert Curvin and Bruce Porter, for instance, found that the pattern of participation (based on the arrest records) during the 1977 blackout riots (which erupted as the result of the decline in the state’s repressive capacity, that is, opportunity) reversed that of the 1960s riots.130 In the 1960s those arrested during the initial days had no previous arrest record. Only toward the end did those with criminal records comprise the majority of those arrested, indicating a shift to opportunistic looting. In the 1977 riots, in contrast, those arrested during the initial period tended to have criminal records and only toward the end did those without criminal records comprise a significant proportion of those arrested.131 I will return to the 1977 riots in Chapter 1. Suffice it to say that such sudden and lengthy declines in the state’s repressive capacity are extraordinary.
Methodology
This book is based on over fifteen years of intermittent ethnographic and participant observation in New York City and greater Paris. I have tried to answer the following three questions: 1) why police behaved similarly with very different minorities in very different contexts; 2) why riots erupted in Paris and New York half a century and an ocean apart; and 3) why riots did not erupt in New York in the 1990s, when a white mayor held power and wielded it through a nearly all-white police force, or in Marseille in 2005. The methodology is threefold. First, I use a series of paired structured comparisons: 1) between New York in the 1960s and Paris in 2005, when both cities had riots; 2) between Paris in 2005 and New York in the 1990s, when only Paris had riots; and 3) between Paris and Marseille in 2005, when only Paris had riots.
Second, I engage in process tracing working backward from incidents of riots and nonriots respectively, what Goertz and Mahoney have called cause of effect.132 I use interviews and participant observations to trace the mechanisms that led incidents of police violence to culminate in riots or alternatively other forms of contentious action such as lawsuits, community protests, civilian review board complaints, the formation of new organizations, or political speeches and rallies. As Sidney Tarrow notes, “If we want to know why a particular outcome emerged, we need to understand how it occurred.”133
Third, I used a combination of participant observation, snowball sampling, and cubist ethnography (so called because it explores a conflict from multiple angles134) in three neighborhoods in New York, and six banlieues outside Paris. I conducted my first interviews in New York as an Aaron Diamond Fellow at the Hunter College Center on AIDS, Drugs and Community Health in the mid-1990s. The Parisian research began when I was a Columbia University Fellow at Reid Hall Paris between 2001 and 2002. In New York, I conducted research in Mott Haven, South Bronx, the section of the Lower East Side called Loisaida by Puerto Ricans and Alphabet City by whites, and South Side Williamsburg, and I worked with the following community-based groups: Musica Against Drugs; St. Ann’s Corner of Harm Reduction; Lower East Side Harm Reduction; Coalition for a District Alternative (CODA); the Institute for Latin Studies; the Puerto Rican Defense Fund; the Legal Aid Society; the Puerto Rican Committee for Human Rights; Charas, South Side Action Committee in Williamsburg; the Justice Committee (originally a subsection of the National Congress for Puerto Rican Rights); Copwatch and New York Coalition Against Police Brutality and Stolen Lives. I interviewed former radical party militants from the Real