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Protesting While Black? The Differential Policing
of American Activism,…
Protesting While Black? The Differential Policing
of American Activism, 1960 to 1990
Omission of studying race as a factor in protest policing among the major, traditional theoretical approaches (threat approach, weakness approach, blue approach, etc.)
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Davenport and Soule: In examining race as a factor in protest policing, it's essential to understand exactly how and to whom African Americans are perceived as threatening. This is done by drawing on 3 primary literatures:
2) Group position/threat (specifically racial threat), and 3) Ethnic competition theory
Used extensively to examine how the relative size of the African American population affects various facets of the criminal justice system.
An increase in the relative size of the black population increases 1) the amount of resources provided to the criminal justice system, 2) arrest and incarceration of blacks, 3) African American police stops and searches, 4) police killings of African Americans, 5) complaints about police brutality
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Davenport and Soule: Potential reasons/ methods (based on former research) on why they expect to find that police act differently to African American protests:
Police have a distinct subculture that governs individual officers’ day-to-day behaviors and emphasizes the ‘‘shared group interests of those responsible for protecting society from its wrongdoers"
Rookie officers quickly learn to protect elite interests and to empha- size the boundary between those who make and enforce the laws and those who may threaten them
Police embody the objectives of the broader political-economic elite; the goal of protecting the status quo is instilled within each class of police recruits through training and socialization
Examining the values, beliefs, and opinions of individual police officers as they relate to subordinate groups
Examining the number of individual-level characteristics of officers (e.g., race, degree of prejudice, and personality type) and citi- zens (e.g., race and demeanor) and attempts to connect these to the probability of using force against subordinate groups
Research and Design
Their unit of analysis was the protest event which they described as
"any type of activity that involves more than one person and is carried out with the explicit purpose of articulating a grievance against (or expressing support for) a target."
They ask focused on events that were likely to have a police presence
Three requirements to be included in data
- There must be more than one person present
- The participants must articulate a claim or grievance
- The event must have occurred in the United States
Data was also collected in two stages
Stage 1. Researchers Read the New York Times daily issue to find protest events
Stage 2. Code each protest event for analysis
Newspaper Data
Biases associated with newspaper articles
Description Bias:
How accurately the article describes the given events.
Selection Bias:
The knowledge that not all event will be covered and that is listed is not a random selection.
Dependent Variables:
Arrests made
Use of physical force or violence
Both arrests made and the use of physical force or violence
Independent : Variables
- Size of protest
2.presence of counter demonstrators6 additional variables related to threatening acts engaged in my protesters
Results
Police presence also increased when protesters used multiple tactics, violence and property damage by protesters and presence of counter demonstrators
Once police arrive
at an event with African Americans present,
they are more likely to make arrests, to use
force/violence, and to use force/violence in
conjunction with arrests than they are to do
nothing, during the period from 1960-1970
a greater proportion of
African American protest events were met
with police presence than were white events; felt like they needed to monitor African American protests
No significant racial differences in police responses after the period between 1960-1970, mainly due to the civil rights victories and legislation
Threat Variables:
When counter-demonstrators are present,
police are less likely to make arrests or to
use force/violence in conjunction with arrests
than they are to do nothing, but they are
slightly more likely to use force, possibly due to the fact they do not know who to arrest
When protesters use violence, police are more likely to use violence and more likely to arrest when protesters use multiple tactics
police were more likely to arrest than do nothing, but more likely to use force/violence, either alone or
in conjunction with arrests, than they are
to do nothing
Conclusion
Protesting While Black phenomenon,
but it is historically bounded and it
depends on what kind of policing we are interested in
Protesting While Black was only found in some years; possibly due to civil rights victories, African Americans changing the way they protest ex: through music and art. and claims overall less threaten the status quo
The findings imply that in many years, white
protesters enjoyed a greater privilege of protest,
and thus greater access to democratic
institutions, than did African American citizen/protesters