Police Power and Race Riots. Cathy Lisa Schneider
reinforce[d] the distrust of the national government…. [In 2005] their protests, neither planned nor coordinated, reflected frustration, rage, alienation, and a lack of confidence in or access to official political channels. In this they resembled African Americans in the 1960s more than immigrants to the United States late in the twentieth century.”107 When then minister of the interior Nicolas Sarkozy announced on the radio that “his police had done nothing wrong” and threatened to take action against delinquents and hooligans, he provoked rapid riot contagion throughout France within days of his statement.
The logic of inquiry, as Gary Goertz and James Mahoney note, is looking for the “cause of effects” (starting with real events and moving backward).108 Three elements, I argue, are present in most ghetto riots: activated categorical boundaries; violent transgressions across categorical boundaries by police or other security forces (or vigilantes protected by security forces) usually leading to the death of an unarmed youth (in interethnic riots the violence transgression is committed by members of dominant groups; in opportunistic riots, a pattern of violence against subordinate groups is suddenly disrupted when the repressive capacity of the state precipitously declines); and failure of state officials to hold police or security forces accountable. These three variables combined make riots more likely.
A wider array and combination of variables avert riots. The explanation is asymmetric, as Goertz and Mahoney observe of most explanations in qualitative research: “The causes of failure outcomes are not necessarily equivalent to the absence or negation of the causes of success outcome.”109 American scholars have attributed the decline of riots to a host of factors. On the one hand, the expansion of Great Society programs, the election of blacks to political office, and the integration of police departments are said to have co-opted activists and deactivated racial boundaries. On the other hand, the decline of riots has been attributed to the mass incarceration of black and, to a somewhat lesser degree, Latino males. As Pamela Oliver notes, “The crucial thing to understand is that a repressive strategy initially triggered by massive urban unrest and other social movements was maintained and expanded long after the riots abated. It was not aimed at preventing unrest by repressing riots: it was preventing unrest by repressing potential rioters. People were not arrested and incarcerated for dissent or even for rioting: they were arrested and incarcerated for crimes.”110 Mass incarceration prevented riots, she notes, “by removing people from the system before they commit[ed] the undesired action.”111
While all of these factors may have reduced the likelihood of riots, none of these explanations answers our puzzle. The first set of factors has deactivated racial boundaries in many cities but does not explain why riots did not erupt in New York during the 1990s despite escalating racial tensions and police violence, when a white mayor, a white administration, and a white police force held sway. Similarly, mass incarceration may have devastated inner-city neighborhoods but cannot account for either the sharp decline in riot frequency since the mid to late 1970s (long before the massive climb in incarceration rates) or the mammoth explosion in 1992 in Los Angeles (when California incarceration rates were substantially higher than the average and New York’s were substantially lower). Indeed, California, having one of the higher incarceration rates in the country, is among the most riot-prone states, perhaps due to the devastating impact that mass incarceration has had on activist networks.
Two factors have received far less attention but have transformed the way in which blacks and Latinos in New York, and in much of the rest of the nation, now respond to police homicides. Together they have dramatically reduced the likelihood of riots. First, social movements born in the cauldron of the great race riots of the 1960s now intentionally and unintentionally channel anger into more organized forms of collective action. Social movements provide a standard repertoire of action. Activists who had cut their teeth on the great race riots of the 1960s led black and Puerto Rican power movements in the 1970s and in the 1980s formed networks of community-based organizations on once riot-strewn streets. By the 1990s they were organizing around a host of critical local issues: struggles over control of local school and area policy boards; the creation of joint planning councils; and the availability of low-income housing and community gardens. In addition they organized against racial profiling and police brutality. Gregg Carter claims that the riots stopped because “you can only burn down your neighborhood so many times.”112 Similarly a neighborhood activist on the Lower East Side told me, “If you look at areas like Watts and Newark, they are still rebuilding from the riots that took place then.” To a certain extent that is true, but other avenues had to become available. Now when police kill, activists and social movement organizations converge. They give solace to the families and friends, lead mass marches, demand indictments and federal interventions if those fail, and help families file civil suits. Some even sit on civilian review boards.
Second, the passage of significant civil rights laws has opened the courts to black and Latino plaintiffs and made the federal government a potential ally.113 “Victims of discrimination,” note Rogers Smith and Desmond King, increasingly seek “relief in the federal courts.”114 Courtroom battles have replaced street struggles. Demands for individual reparations have replaced demands for social justice. Not-guilty verdicts in criminal trials for homicide are not the end of the road. The Justice Department can try police officers for the violation of victims’ civil rights. Families frequently file civil suits. Between 1977 and 1998 only three New York City police officers were convicted for homicide while on duty.115 Yet during the 1990s New York spent approximately twenty-five million dollars a year to settle police violence cases out of court.116 Legal proceedings provide a clear course of action and reduce feelings of impotence, and they take years to pursue. At the end of the process (whatever the verdict) the energy of families, communities, and social movement activists has been depleted. As Vincente “Panama” Alba, the director of the Coalition to Fight Police Brutality, told me, “People burn out, get frustrated. The mobilization necessary to do justice in one case is extraordinary. It is difficult to go on and on.”
In sum, the civil rights movement and the riots that followed changed the environment for families and friends of those killed by police. On the one hand, wars on drugs and crime have led to the incarceration of two million mostly young black and Latino men and the penal supervision of another seven million. On the other hand, community organizations have developed a standard repertoire for dealing with police violence. Victims and their families now fight police violence through a combination of organized street demonstrations and legal justice. Although homicide convictions of on-duty police officers are exceptional, growing numbers of attorneys specializing in civil actions have convinced many cities to routinely settle police brutality cases out of court. Together these factors have reduced the likelihood of riots, even where white mayors, white administrations, and white police forces hold sway.
The deactivation of racial boundaries has also made riots rare in Marseille, the only city in France that did not burn in 2005. Despite the city’s endemic poverty, unemployment, and crime and its large immigrant and Muslim populations, political leaders in Marseille rejected the dominant French republican assimilationist paradigm. They created integrated spaces for deliberation and interaction and recognized and consulted regularly with leaders of ethnic organizations to improve relationships between police and minority youths (largely by letting police develop long-term relationships with neighborhoods rather than shifting them about). This and Marseille’s integrated downtown streets and beaches made racial boundaries less polarized than those of Paris, Lyon, or other major cities. But Marseille’s political system is riddled with corruption and ties to organized crime. Ironically, even mafias deactivate racial boundaries and make riots less likely, as I explain in Chapter 4, by creating a weblike political structure in place of a bifurcated boundary. They also punish those who engage in undirected violence or strike out on their own. (Organized criminal groups often play a similar role in the United States.)
Defining Riots
This is a study of modern urban riots, what have sometimes been called ghetto riots or urban uprisings. In the modular modern urban riot unruly crowds burn, loot, or otherwise assail stores, public buildings, cars, and/or symbols of state power. They also engage in confrontations with police, usually by throwing