Police Power and Race Riots. Cathy Lisa Schneider
as the rights of American citizens.”103
There are, however, several problems with Katz’s otherwise compelling analysis. First, new immigrants did not riot in France. Of the more than 4,000 arrested, only 120 were born outside France.104 Those who rioted were French—black and Arab children and grandchildren of former colonial subjects, and, in the case of Algerians, former Frenchmen. While the French continued to refer to these youths as immigrants, their lives, in fact, paralleled those of blacks and many Latinos in the United States.
Second, the concept of indirect rule does not explain why black and Puerto Rican residents of New York City—a city with a white mayor who barely disguised his contempt for the black community, excluded blacks from his administration, and did nothing to increase minority representation in the overwhelmingly white police force—did not rise up in the 1990s. Even after the brutal slayings of Anthony Baez, Patrick Dorismand, and Amadou Diallo and the torture of Abner Louima the city remained quiet.
Third, repression is not a good explanation for quiescence, since Katz, as well as others, uses it to explain revolts. Finally, and most critically, Katz fails to question some of the most common explanations for the American hot summer or ghetto revolts. Poverty, racism, and unemployment may cause great pain and misery, but human beings are capable of tolerating great injustice in silence. Before we can understand boundary deactivation, we need to reexamine boundary activation—those rare, singular moments when all social interactions revolve around a single us/them boundary. In other words, we need to sort through the smoldering ashes of urban unrest before we can explain the quelling of the fire.
The Argument
In countries with large unaffiliated or detachable segments of the electorate, appeals to racial fears can provide the margin of victory in tight elections. The fear of being labeled soft on crime, immigration, or security encourages a rush to the right as the major political actors engage in competitive outbidding. Political campaigns capture media attention. Sensationalist and racially distorted media stories put additional pressure on political candidates in tight races. As Lewis Dexter observes, a politician “makes the world to which he thinks he is responding.”105 The bellicose rhetoric of the campaign, as Fassin observes, “legitimizes not only the police’s views of the situation but also the way they work to impose order.”106 The use of phrases such as “war on crime” or “war on drugs” evokes a military logic and leads to increasingly violent policing in poor minority neighborhoods.
Racially targeted police violence inflicts an ugly wound: it undermines the legitimacy of the state and sends the message that the lives of some of its citizens are not valued. In the absence of strong social movements with a standard nonviolent repertoire or state action (real or potential) on behalf of injured communities, a particularly egregious incident of police violence, such as the killing of an unarmed youth, may incite riots. Most riots begin as nonviolent gatherings and pleas for justice by families, friends, and neighbors of the victims. Police repression of such gatherings encourages others to join the fray. Network ties between residents of an affected area and those who live in places with similar conditions lead to riot diffusion, particularly to areas where affected minorities comprise the majority of residents. Where social movements or other social or revolutionary organizations channel anger and enforce discipline, however, or where alternative avenues of redress exist, riots are rare. The process, then, often proceeds as follows:
1) Voters from the dominant majority find stigmatization and control of racialized minorities politically attractive and credible, especially when political, spatial, or social-economic change threatens established racial boundaries and creates insecurity.
2) Politicians in tight races attempt to appeal to a detachable section of the electorate by playing to racial fears.
3) The political scramble to avoid being outsegued on the crime issue leads major political actors to engage in increasingly harsh law-and-order public discourse.
4) Increased political attention to crime leads to spikes in sensationalist and racially distorted media coverage.
5) Politicians favoring harsh policing measures are elected and pass harsh punitive crime and/or anti-immigrant laws.
6) Police interpret such signals to mean they are immune from prosecution when interacting with members of subjugated groups.
7) There is a dramatic increase in levels of police brutality in stigmatized minority neighborhoods, leading inexorably to a particularly egregious act of violence—usually the killing of a young unarmed minority male.
8) The state is unwilling to hold the police officers accountable or, worse, takes the side of the police officers against the victim.
9) Lacking other options (such as established institutions to address or channel grievances, strong social or community organizations, or a repertoire of successful nonviolent protest), communities explode.
10) As knowledge of or rumors about events spread, riots diffuse to surrounding neighborhoods, then to cities and towns with similar conditions, particularly those where affected minorities constitute the majority of residents. National-level incidents (such as the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.) and officeholders provoke more rapid riot diffusion than neighborhood-level events or officeholders.
What is key is not the sum of these elements but the way in which they concatenate: the mechanisms that link an incident of police violence to riots or, alternatively, to other forms of contentious politics. This book traces the processes and sequences of interactions and events in two cities with vastly different social and political structures, racial constructions, and political economies. Police use violence against subjugated minorities in both cities, but in one city subjugated minorities, particularly poor minority youths, respond in ways that sometimes culminate in full-fledged riots. In the other, subjugated minorities and victims of police abuse more often engage in conventional forms of individual and collective action, organizing protest marches and civil disobedience; petitioning district attorneys, federal prosecutors, political officeholders, and members of the Department of Justice; and filing civil law suits.
In 1964 riots broke out in New York when a) police violence was ignored and unofficially encouraged; b) mass migration, white flight, urban renewal programs, and highway construction devastated black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods, overwhelming the capacity of black and Puerto Rican organizations to channel anger into sustained nonviolent action; and c) blacks and Latinos were largely denied access to local courts, civilian review boards, or other forms of legal redress. Riots broke out in 2005 in Paris when a) growing police violence against blacks and Arabs was officially ignored and unofficially encouraged; b) the discourse of republican equality did not allow open discussion of racial dynamics, much less the development of civil and social organizations to address these dynamics; c) revolutionary organizations such as the Front de Libération Nationale (National Liberation Front of Algeria, or FLN) had long ceased to exist; d) courts refused to hold police officers accountable for violence used against North and sub-Saharan African immigrants or black and Arab youths, and those who charged police officers with civil offenses were far more likely to be sentenced for rebellion than to win their cases.
The structure of policing shaped the geography of urban unrest. In the United States, the decentralized structure of the police, with each unit under the control of a local mayor, led to a segmented, staggered pattern of riots during the 1960s, which crisscrossed the country for half a decade. Riots erupted most violently in Los Angeles, Detroit, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Newark, cities where residential patterns were most segregated and police abuse most profuse. By the late 1970s riots had become rare. Still in some cases—most notably Liberty City, Florida, in 1980 and Los Angeles in 1992, where racial boundaries were particularly contentious and where police operated with virtual impunity—they reoccurred. Yet even those extremely damaging riots were isolated geographically, as the federal government intervened to subdue the rioters and hold local police accountable for their actions.
In France, in contrast, the centralized structure of policing produced a different pattern of urban unrest. Since the police were national, it was the national government that determined local reactions. The centralized structure of policing ensured,