Police Power and Race Riots. Cathy Lisa Schneider
groups expect police to make these distinctions and pass laws to facilitate this process. In 1925, for instance, the French minister of the interior told the prefect of police, “[W]e want to weed out the bad ones, but we cannot give them the impression that we are treating them like foreigners, undesirable foreigners at that, and requiring passports for that reason…. We can demand passports under other pretexts, but not to protect ourselves from them; we must appear to be protecting them.”22
Police forces do not invent these categories. Rather they use categories that mirror those of the society in which they are embedded. They commonly match preexisting exterior categories such as race or ethnicity to interior categories such as citizenship rights, obligations, and forbidden behaviors. These classifications serve as shorthand, allowing officers to summarize “complex and ambiguous situations in a short period of time.”23 Some neighborhoods are designated as in need of protection and others as foreign or dangerous. “Both the racial characteristics of the suspect and the suspect’s neighborhood influence police decisions to stop, search or arrest a suspect,” Jeffrey Fagan, Amanda Geller, Garth Davies, and Valerie West observe: race and neighborhood interactively “animate the formation of suspicion among police officers.”24
In racially divided societies, police, like occupying armies, mark stigmatized minority neighborhoods as enemy territory. “Enforcement through bounding,” note O Dochartaigh and Bosi, “has the key advantage of simplicity…. Boundaries provide a simple and powerful method of communication, pouring huge and often complex information into a single symbol that distinguishes between the vast and complex variety of the internal and similarly complex external. To bound space is to communicate huge volumes of information in a single symbol.”25
The categories such boundaries inscribe are largely fungible. Tilly notes, “[S]eemingly contradictory categorical principles such as age, race, gender and ethnicity operate in similar ways and can be organizationally combined or substituted within limits set by previously established scripting and local knowledge.”26 In New York and Paris, police paint blacks, Puerto Ricans, Arabs, and Berbers as racialized others. One French officer who railed against “little jerkoffs,” for instance, told Didier Fassin, “The blacks are just like the Arabs, except they’ve no brain.”27 Similarly two high-ranking members of a French left-wing police union told me a story that linked both blacks and Arabs to a host of ominous threats:
The problem here began after the war in Algeria. The Arabs could not stay there because they had collaborated with France. They ended up congregating in small areas. Housing prices went down and black immigrants now found it very cheap and gathered there too. This concentration created an underground world…. Yet for us as police it is good, it is easier to bust. If they were spread around the city it would be difficult to police. If you let them live together, you do not even have to go into the cité. You can put police at either end and close it. It is a way to localize and crystallize delinquency in a single place. But, if you live there and see all blacks and Arabs on the pavement you can imagine people say “what are the police doing?”28
“Only in extremely unequal societies where particular groups are denied full membership,” notes Pieter Spierenburg, “do police act in a disrespectful and brutal manner with unarmed citizenry.”29 Paul Chevigny concurs: “The term punishment is never used unless the person on whom the penalty is inflicted is clearly subordinate to the one imposing the penal act.”30 Fassin observes,
Police violence, whether physical or moral, is exercised in a radically and institutionally unequal manner. On one side are individuals who have not only the monopoly of the legitimate use of force, but also exclusive access to effective use of it given the circumstances. On the other are individuals who are doubly captive, owing to both the physical coercion they undergo and the latent threat weighing on them if ever they should have the bad idea of talking back. Whether detained, handcuffed or simply surrounded by officers, the person exposed to their power is rendered structurally inferior: he is bound to submit, and any protest or rebellion can only lead to even greater submission. Violence is therefore almost always strictly unilateral. But it is also targeted. It is not applied to all.31
Comparative studies of policing tend to emphasize the impact of different state structures and institutional cultures on policing strategies. “Policing styles are influenced by the political system,” argue Donatella Della Porta and Herbert Reiter. “Institutional features such as police organization, the nature of the judiciary, law codes and constitutional rights—may play a role in defining the opportunities and constraints.”32 But if institutional structure and culture were key, then police in France—a country with a strong central state apparatus, a national police force, common law tradition, and elimination of racial categories in census and law—should interact with black and Arab residents very differently than American police—locally controlled, in a federal state with statutory law and multicultural traditions—interact with blacks and Latinos.
Yet we see strikingly similar interactions between police and minority populations in Paris and those in New York. The structure of inequality at large and the demands placed on police by powerful social classes, dominant racial groups, and the state are more important than the culture and organization of the institution. “The problem is not to know whether the police act identically everywhere within a national territory or across borders,” as Fassin points out, “but whether the type of relation they have with a certain public, the way in which political incentives influence their practice, the effects of various systems of evaluation and sanctioning on their conducts, or the justification they provide for their deviant behaviors are generalizable.”33
Debating Riots
In the first major study of seventy-five riots occurring in the United States between 1964 and 1967, the U.S. Commission on Civil Disorders (aka the Kerner Commission) in 1968 reached the stark conclusion that “our nation is moving towards two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.”34 While members of the commission observed that “almost invariably the incident that ignites disorder arises from police action,” they were careful to emphasize that “the disorder did not erupt as a result of a single triggering or precipitating incident. Instead it was generated out of an increasingly disturbed social atmosphere, in which typically a series of tension-heightening incidents over a period of weeks or months became linked in the minds of many in the Negro community with a reservoir of underlying grievances.”35 The solution would require nothing less than “the realization of common opportunities for all…. From every American it will require new attitudes, new understandings, and above all a new will.”36
The findings were simultaneously too vast and too limited. The list was too vast. While blacks and Latinos suffered immense hardships and injustice, they did not burn buildings or loot stores to protest every wrong. The commission listed the following twelve most cited grievances in descending order by intensity: 1) police practices; 2) unemployment and underemployment; 3) inadequate housing; 4) inadequate education; 5) poor recreational facilities and programs; 6) ineffectiveness of the political structure and grievance mechanisms; 7) disrespectful white attitudes; 8) discriminatory administration of justice; 9) inadequacy of federal programs; 10) inadequacy of municipal services; 11) discriminatory consumer and credit practices; and 12) inadequate welfare programs.37 Of those grievances, numbers 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12 are arguably worse today, while neighborhoods are quiescent. Their most cited grievance—police practices—was given the least attention and led to the least reform, while the change in grievance mechanisms (number 6) may be the single best explanation for the lack of riots today.
It is unlikely that extreme deprivation caused the riots. Susan Olzak and her coauthors, in a massive multiple regression of 1,770 racial and ethnic collection action events and 154 race riots in the United States between 1960 and 1993, found little evidence that riots were caused by extreme deprivation. Instead they found that riots occurred where the situations for blacks were improving, where neighborhoods had become less segregated, and where poverty had begun to decline.38 Riots erupt when life improves for the poor and oppressed, they argue—an equally questionable conclusion.39
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