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 garbage or other objects. Some rioters may attack members of dominant groups, but these are usually opportunistic encounters and not central activities. Most participants attack only property. These uprisings include elements of what Charles Tilly has labeled “broken negotiations,” “scattered attacks,” and “opportunism”—that is, violent reactions to transgressions or violations of unwritten (or written) social pacts or agreements; symbolic and other attacks on property (weapons of the weak); and taking advantage of disorder either to improve one’s material standing or to wreak revenge.117 As in other forms of violence, riots ensue when “actors on at least one side respond by engaging in coordinated attacks on sites across the boundary while those on the other side engage in defense against those attacks.”118 Although property damage in such riots can run high, most deaths result from police killings. In the 1960s, as Thomas Sugrue notes, “Only a handful of cities—notably, Detroit, Newark and Los Angeles—accounted for nearly all the deaths. And, most of the casualties were the result of law enforcement actions against blacks, not black violence against the police or white bystanders.”119
The term “riot” is also used to describe forms of violence having little resemblance to the typical ghetto riot, other than activated categorical boundaries and violent transgressions across those boundaries. Rampages by dominant groups against stigmatized minorities, commonly called race riots, are closer to pogroms. They are usually either instigated or protected by the police, such as the white riot in 1900 in New York, which was set off after a black man stabbed a white off-duty policeman, and the anti-immigrant riot in Vitry, France, in 1977, instigated by the Communist mayor. Other examples include the smaller anti-immigrant riots in Germany in the 1990s.120 Similarly, large-scale interethnic riots, with their extremely high death tolls, more closely fit what Charles Tilly has called coordinated destruction.121 The defining feature of coordinated destruction in addition to activated boundaries is that at least one side employs specialists in violence and includes powerful, well-connected people willing to use lethal violence to acquire or maintain control over valued resources and/or extend their jurisdiction over territory. “The communities are organized only along intra-ethnic lines and the interconnections with other communities are very weak or even nonexistent,” Ashutosh Varshney similarly observes, making “ethnic violence … quite likely.”122 The most deadly are those between groups with significant size and long-standing grievances, such as those between Hindus and Muslims in Asia. If only one side includes violence specialists, the conflict may become genocide. Donald Horowitz, one of the world’s experts on such conflicts, does not believe that ghetto uprisings should be called riots at all, given how dissimilar they are in form and content to these violent conflagrations.123
Some ghetto riots include aspects of interethnic riots, as when minority groups attack members of other minority groups or, more uncommonly, members of the dominant majority. Some interethnic conflict between blacks and Koreans in the course of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, for instance, may have been motivated by a Korean grocer’s killing of a fifteen-year-old African American girl a year before the riot and the white judge’s decision (a week before the Rodney King verdict) to reduce the jury’s recommendation for a sixteen-year sentence for manslaughter to a five-month suspended sentence and five-hundred-dollar fine. Yet, even here only two Asians were killed and most rioters attacked property rather than individuals. In most ghetto riots the boundary activated is not interethnic but rather drawn between stigmatized minorities (both blacks and Latinos in the United States and blacks, Arabs, and Berbers in France) and the state. Police, the only specialists in violence, do the bulk of the killings.
Ghetto riots often include elements of opportunism, as disorder opens up possibilities for personal profit.124 As Tilly observes, individuals “looted when they saw that law enforcement had disappeared and that store owners had lost control over their premises.”125 One woman told an interviewer during the 1965 Watts riot, “Well, you could see all the stuff lying there and all those people going in and out and somebody was going to take it, so I thought I might as well take it for myself.”126 Another, churchgoing woman put it this way: “It dawned on me as I was passing a certain store that I had been paying for my present television for five years and [therefore] the store owed me five televisions. So I got three and I believe the store still owes me two.”127 A self-identified looter in Detroit in 1967 told Nathan Caplan that the blacks were “trying to get the goods from the white folks because the white folks own everything and they [blacks] were just trying to get something so they can own it.”128 Even in opportunistic looting, as Tilly notes, activated racial boundaries divided “the overwhelmingly black looters and fire bombers from the overwhelmingly white fire and police departments.”129
Opportunity alone rarely leads to riots. Where there is a long-standing pattern of police abuse of stigmatized minorities, however, a sudden decline in the state’s repressive capacity may spark riots. As with other forms of collective action, the order and magnitude of threat and opportunity lead to different patterns of mobilization. Robert Curvin and Bruce Porter, for instance, found that the pattern of participation (based on the arrest records) during the 1977 blackout riots (which erupted as the result of the decline in the state’s repressive capacity, that is, opportunity) reversed that of the 1960s riots.130 In the 1960s those arrested during the initial days had no previous arrest record. Only toward the end did those with criminal records comprise the majority of those arrested, indicating
