Police Power and Race Riots. Cathy Lisa Schneider
the Puerto Rican Socialist Party, and to a lesser extent the Black Panthers and Nation of Islam, most of whom were founders or activists in the community groups mentioned above. In addition to the New York City Police Department (NYPD), I interviewed members of the National Black Police Association, the Police Executive Reform Foundation, and the former police chief of New Haven. In addition, I interviewed mothers and fathers of those killed by police and activists in anti-police-brutality organizations.
In Paris, I conducted research principally in the northern districts of 95 (Val-d’Oise) and 93 (Seine-Saint-Denis). In Val-d’Oise I worked primarily in Garges-lès-Gonesse, Sarcelles, and Villiers-le-Bel. In Seine-Saint-Denis I worked principally in Aubervilliers, Clichy-sous-Bois, and the Cité des Bosquets (housing project) in Montfermeil. I participated with and conducted participant observations with Veto, Movement immigration et banlieue (MIB), and Groupe de travail banlieue and interviewed members of Indigenes de republique; Movement contre les bavures policières; Sortir du colonialism; and Association, Collectif, Liberte, Égalité, Fraternité, Ensemble et Uni (ACLEFEU). From 2001 to 2005 I worked predominantly in Sarcelles, Garges-les-Gonesse, and Aubervilliers. In 2006 I began working in Clichy-sous-Bois, Montfermeil, and Villier-le-Bel. I conducted my first interview with the French police in 2001 and continued to interview police officers until 2011. I also interviewed families and friends of young people killed by police, and I interviewed one local mayor. I have avoided using the names of those I interviewed except where they have organized or spoken out publicly on the issues. In the case of active-duty police officers, I have taken pains to disguise the neighborhoods and other identifying features as well. All of the interviews conducted after 2001 were conducted in French, although bilingual friends sometimes accompanied me and helped interpret. The translations of all interviews and French writings are my own, except where otherwise noted.
Table 1. New York City neighborhoods
Source: Christopher Hanson-Sanchez, Puerto Rican Specific Data: Institute of Puerto Rican Policy Census Through 1990 (New York: Microdata Supplies, 1995).
Source: Christopher Hanson-Sanchez, Puerto Rican Specific Data: Institute of Puerto Rican Policy Census Through 1990 (New York: Microdata Supplies, 1995).
Source: New York City Health Atlas 1994 (New York: United Hospital Fund, n.d.).
The neighborhoods where I conducted field research in New York were predominantly Puerto Rican, but I argue that the experiences of residents of these neighborhoods is generalizable to residents of other stigmatized minority neighborhoods. First, at the time I conducted field research they were among the poorest neighborhoods in New York. Second, the Puerto Rican experience in New York has been similar to that of African Americans. Both groups have lived in New York City for at least one generation; the largest wave of black and Puerto Rican migrants arrived in the 1950s and early 1960s. Third, and most important for this study, blacks and Puerto Ricans have had similar interactions with police, and most of those killed by the NYPD have been either black or Puerto Rican. As Ramiro Martinez observes,
Table 2. Parisian banlieues, 2009 statistics
Source: Institute National de la statistique et des etudes économiques (INSEE), at the following Web sites: http://www.insee.fr/fr/bases-de-donnees/esl/comparateur.asp?codgeo=com-95585#; http://www.insee.fr/fr/bases-de-donnees/esl/comparateur.asp?codgeo=com-95680; http://www.insee.fr/fr/bases-de-donnees/esl/comparateur.asp?codgeo=com-93014; http://www.insee.fr/fr/bases-de-donnees/esl/comparateur.asp?codgeo=com-93001;http://www.insee.fr/fr/bases-de-donnees/esl/comparateur.asp?codgeo=com-95268; http://www.insee.fr/fr/bases-de-donnees/esl/comparateur.asp?codgeo=cv-9315; http://sig.ville.gouv.fr/zone/3159076; http://www.journaldunet.com/management/ville/.
Scholars have noted that legal cynicism and dissatisfaction with police are both intertwined with levels of neighborhood disadvantage, an effect that trumps racial differences in attitudes towards the police even after controlling for neighborhood violent crime rates. Moreover, ecological characteristics of policing also include the use of physical and deadly force at the city level, officer misconduct in police precincts and slower response times in communities highlighting research that attitudes towards the policing may be a function of a neighborhood context and even determinants in police killings.135
My work thus addresses an important lacuna in research on ethnicity, policing, and riots. As Martinez notes, “The scarcity of research on Latinos and policing is one of the most enduring shortcomings in the development of race/ethnicity and the criminal justice system scholarship.”136
Moreover the categorical boundaries that New York police use to classify populations locate both blacks and Puerto Ricans on the same side of a racial divide, in diametric opposition to the city’s white populations. Police in France do the same with blacks and Arabs. As Tilly observes, “Durable inequality among categories arises because people who control access to value-producing resources solve pressing organizational problems by means of categorical distinctions. For these reasons, inequalities by race, gender, ethnicity class, age, citizenship, educational level and other apparently contradictory principles of differentiation form through similar social processes and are to an important degree organizationally interchangeable.”137
Organization of the Book
In Chapter 1 I look at the construction of racial boundaries in the United States and the violent policing of those boundaries as large waves of black migrants from the South and Puerto Ricans arrived in New York City. I trace the processes that sparked riots in 1935; in 1943; most significantly in 1964, when conflicts in New York initiated a chain of riots throughout the country; and again in 1967, when predominantly Puerto Rican East Harlem and South Bronx burst into flames. I also introduce the three neighborhoods of Mott Haven, South Bronx; Williamsburg, Brooklyn; and the Lower East Side of Manhattan (the section popularly called Alphabet City by Anglos and Loisaida by Latinos), and I track them from their founding to the macroeconomic restructuring of the late 1950s and early 1960s, the race riots of 1964 and 1967, the radical black and Puerto Rican organizing efforts from 1969 to 1973, and the immensely destructive 1977 blackout riots. I conclude this chapter by discussing the 1989 election of David Dinkins, the first African American mayor of New York, and contrasting the dynamic that led to the 1992 Rodney King riot in Los Angeles with that which prevented a small, but similar riot in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan from exploding into a citywide conflagration the same year.
In Chapter 2 I examine the construction of racial boundaries in France and the policing of those boundaries in Paris from the occupation of Algeria and the creation of a French/Muslim racial boundary through the creation of the “North African brigades” and the violent slaughter of unarmed Algerian protesters in 1961 to violent attacks by dominant groups and police on black and Arab youths. This chapter concludes with the 2002 presidential race and the strong first-round near win of the racist National Front candidate