Police Power and Race Riots. Cathy Lisa Schneider
not simply by weeks or months of tension-producing incidents but by a long history of violent policing of racial boundaries that had only intensified in the civil rights era. In a prescient study of seventy-five riots that erupted in black neighborhoods between 1913 and 1963, Stanley Lieberson and Arnold Silverman found that in those cities where ghetto residents rioted, blacks had lower rates of unemployment, better jobs, and higher wages and the wage differential between blacks and whites was smaller.40 Yet it was not the improvements, they insisted, that precipitated the riots. It was police violence. Moreover, in those cities where ghetto riots erupted 1) the police force was white; 2) the local government was white, elected through a system “less sensitive to the demands of the electorate”; and 3) the businesses community was white.
Local government, they pointed out, is “one of the most important institutions to consider in an analysis of race riots. Municipal policies, particularly with respect to police, can greatly influence the chances of a race riot.”41 Riots are “more likely to occur where social institutions function inadequately, or when grievances cannot be resolved, or resolved under the existing institutional arrangements … such that a disadvantaged segment is unable to obtain recognition of its interests and concerns through normal political channels.”42 In other words, Lieberson and Silverman’s findings coincided with number 1 and number 6 of the Kerner Commission’s list of twelve grievances.
In 1970, Harlan Hahn and Joe Feagan reported similar findings in their study of riots in New York and Detroit. With “few exceptions, every major incident of urban violence was triggered by police…. it is likely that hostility of Negroes towards white authority has been kindled by abrasive contacts with ghetto police.”43 Similarly, Robert Fogelson found that “with a few exceptions … the nineteen sixties riots were all precipitated by police actions.”44 Yet none of these authors produced a full-length book on police riots, or on the interaction between the two; and no one attempted to generalize these findings and apply them to riots outside the United States.
The Kerner Commission findings were clearly overdetermined. Lieberson and Silverman’s, Hahn and Feagan’s, and Fogelson’s findings, on the other hand, were drawn from studies of American cities that had similar characteristics. It was difficult to know if their findings were replicable in a different context. A cursory examination of riots in Great Britain, however, gives some added support to their conclusions. Before I turn to studies of riots in Great Britain, however, I consider a final study of the American riots, one that provides a clue as to why some residents and not others respond to police violence with riotous actions.
In 1968 Edward Ransford conducted a survey of residents of the Los Angeles Watts neighborhood, many of whom had participated in the 1965 riots. All residents surveyed expressed an overwhelming sense of powerlessness born of “extreme discrimination barriers … a belief that all channels for social redress are closed.”45 Although black militants shared this sense of political powerlessness, they exhibited a much lower level of individual powerlessness. Melvin Seeman later theorized that the black militants Ransford studied were less likely to riot because activism had enhanced their sense of self-worth: “The militants [were less] likely to be low in powerlessness when this refers to their sense of personal efficacy but high in powerlessness in the sense of being aware of (and fighting against) blocked social control (discrimination and bureaucratic arrangements).”46 While both Seeman and Ransford stress the importance of personal efficacy in dissuading black militants from participation in riots, there is another explanation: Black activists participated in organizations that both prized disciplined strategic action and offered an alternative repertoire to pursue justice. Participation in successful collective actions increased activists’ confidence in their own collective capacity and made them less susceptible to the pull of flaming streets.
British Police Studies
Not long after race-related riots declined in the United States, the first major riots erupted in Great Britain. They began innocuously enough when in March 1981, following the “Black People’s Day of Action” parade, conflicts between police and predominantly black youths burst forth into small-scale confrontations. At the beginning of April, the metropolitan police initiated Operation Swamp 81, a campaign that included a massive sweep of the black neighborhood Brixton. Over 1,000 men were stopped and frisked in a matter of days. On April 10, police chased a badly bleeding young black man who had passed by them apparently after having been stabbed by a group of boys. When a police officer tried to take the wounded youth to a waiting car (allegedly to get him to a hospital), a crowd gathered to protect the young man. The officer called for police backup. Rumors began to spread that the police had let the youth die in custody, and the crowd began to turn on them. As more backup police arrived, young people pelted them with bricks and bottles. Lootings and then fires followed. In two days 28 buildings and 120 cars were set aflame and 117 stores were damaged and/or looted. Before the riots ended, 65 civilians and 229 police officers were injured.
Then in July riots tore through Handsworth, Birmingham; Southall, London; Toxteth, Liverpool; Moss Side, Manchester; Leeds and Leicester; Halifax in Southampton; Bedford in Gloucester; Wolverhampton and Coventry; and Bristol and Edinburgh. A national commission was formed to look into the cause of the riots. The official report of the commission, known as the Scarman Report after the presiding magistrate, determined that the riots “were not planned but a spontaneous outburst of built-up resentment sparked by particular incidents, … a loss of confidence and mistrust in the police and their methods of policing, … and racial disadvantage and racial discrimination.”47
In 1985 a new wave of violent confrontations between black youths and white police officers tore through Brixton, the Handsworth suburb of Birmingham, the West Midland areas of Coventry and Wolverhampton, and then the St. Paul’s district of Bristol after a black taxi driver was arrested by a white police officer for a parking ticket. The worst riots occurred in the mostly black Broadwater Farm housing estate in the predominantly white Tottenham district of London. Residents complained that police had occupied the area and harassed, abused, and otherwise treated violently and disrespectfully the area’s residents. Police shot rioters with plastic bullets, and the police constable Keith Blakelock was murdered with a machete. Another 20 civilians and 223 police officers were injured.48 The 1985 riots, like the preceding 1981 riots, had come on the heels of a spectacular rise in repressive drug and street crime policing.
The two waves of riots acted as a catalyst, generating a surge of new research. They also shifted the direction of the field from a highly theoretical academic discipline to a broader policy-oriented one. Most studies, however, continued to focus on the micro-processes and institutional culture of the police, a methodological approach heavily reliant on participant observation. David Waddington, Simon Holdaway, Clive Norris, Nigel and Jane Fielding, Charles Kemp, and Robert Reiner are among the most important British scholars in the field. David Waddington developed a “Flashpoint model” listing six factors that together explained why minor altercations could spiral out of control: 1) structural—poverty, unemployment, relative deprivation, and racial discrimination; 2) political/ideological—a group’s political legitimacy, power, and influence or lack thereof; 3) cultural—the rules, norms, and self-definition a group develops and the compatibility of those norms with those of the police and society at large; 4) contextual—history of negative interactions between a minority group and the police, leading to a breakdown in communication; 5) situational—specific spatial and symbolic characteristics of the site of conflict; and 6) interactional—personal miscommunication, signaling, and misreading of particular actions.49
Waddington’s emphasis on conflicting interpretation of events rather than the events themselves and his insistence that the precipitating event might be quite minor make specificity difficult. Waddington recognizes that structural inequality has a deleterious impact on the relationship between police and racial minorities, but he does not identify the processes or mechanisms that structure inequality along race or ethnic lines, or the ways that police actions are rooted in and perpetuate categorical inequality. Moreover studies have provided scant support for his model. In a study of police stops and seizures, Norris and his coauthors found no evidence to support the claim that black youths behave more disrespectfully toward police than do white youths.50 Police