looting. In the 1977 riots, in contrast, those arrested during the initial period tended to have criminal records and only toward the end did those without criminal records comprise a significant proportion of those arrested.131 I will return to the 1977 riots in Chapter 1. Suffice it to say that such sudden and lengthy declines in the state’s repressive capacity are extraordinary.
Methodology
This book is based on over fifteen years of intermittent ethnographic and participant observation in New York City and greater Paris. I have tried to answer the following three questions: 1) why police behaved similarly with very different minorities in very different contexts; 2) why riots erupted in Paris and New York half a century and an ocean apart; and 3) why riots did not erupt in New York in the 1990s, when a white mayor held power and wielded it through a nearly all-white police force, or in Marseille in 2005. The methodology is threefold. First, I use a series of paired structured comparisons: 1) between New York in the 1960s and Paris in 2005, when both cities had riots; 2) between Paris in 2005 and New York in the 1990s, when only Paris had riots; and 3) between Paris and Marseille in 2005, when only Paris had riots.
Second, I engage in process tracing working backward from incidents of riots and nonriots respectively, what Goertz and Mahoney have called cause of effect.132 I use interviews and participant observations to trace the mechanisms that led incidents of police violence to culminate in riots or alternatively other forms of contentious action such as lawsuits, community protests, civilian review board complaints, the formation of new organizations, or political speeches and rallies. As Sidney Tarrow notes, “If we want to know why a particular outcome emerged, we need to understand how it occurred.”133
Third, I used a combination of participant observation, snowball sampling, and cubist ethnography (so called because it explores a conflict from multiple angles134) in three neighborhoods in New York, and six banlieues outside Paris. I conducted my first interviews in New York as an Aaron Diamond Fellow at the Hunter College Center on AIDS, Drugs and Community Health in the mid-1990s. The Parisian research began when I was a Columbia University Fellow at Reid Hall Paris between 2001 and 2002. In New York, I conducted research in Mott Haven, South Bronx, the section of the Lower East Side called Loisaida by Puerto Ricans and Alphabet City by whites, and South Side Williamsburg, and I worked with the following community-based groups: Musica Against Drugs; St. Ann’s Corner of Harm Reduction; Lower East Side Harm Reduction; Coalition for a District Alternative (CODA); the Institute for Latin Studies; the Puerto Rican Defense Fund; the Legal Aid Society; the Puerto Rican Committee for Human Rights; Charas, South Side Action Committee in Williamsburg; the Justice Committee (originally a subsection of the National Congress for Puerto Rican Rights); Copwatch and New York Coalition Against Police Brutality and Stolen Lives. I interviewed former radical party militants from the Real Great Society, the Young Lords, the Puerto Rican Socialist Party, and to a lesser extent the Black Panthers and Nation of Islam, most of whom were founders or activists in the community groups mentioned above. In addition to the New York City Police Department (NYPD), I interviewed members of the National Black Police Association, the Police Executive Reform Foundation, and the former police chief of New Haven. In addition, I interviewed mothers and fathers of those killed by police and activists in anti-police-brutality organizations.
In Paris, I conducted research principally in the northern districts of 95 (Val-d’Oise) and 93 (Seine-Saint-Denis). In Val-d’Oise I worked primarily in Garges-lès-Gonesse, Sarcelles, and Villiers-le-Bel. In Seine-Saint-Denis I worked principally in Aubervilliers, Clichy-sous-Bois, and the Cité des Bosquets (housing project) in Montfermeil. I participated with and conducted participant observations with Veto, Movement immigration et banlieue (MIB), and Groupe de travail banlieue and interviewed members of Indigenes de republique; Movement contre les bavures policières; Sortir du colonialism; and Association, Collectif, Liberte, Égalité, Fraternité, Ensemble et Uni (ACLEFEU). From 2001 to 2005 I worked predominantly in Sarcelles, Garges-les-Gonesse, and Aubervilliers. In 2006 I began working in Clichy-sous-Bois, Montfermeil, and Villier-le-Bel. I conducted my first interview with the French police in 2001 and continued to interview police officers until 2011. I also interviewed families and friends of young people killed by police, and I interviewed one local mayor. I have avoided using the names of those I interviewed except where they have organized or spoken out publicly on the issues. In the case of active-duty police officers, I have taken pains to disguise the neighborhoods and other identifying features as well. All of the interviews conducted after 2001 were conducted in French, although bilingual friends sometimes accompanied me and helped interpret. The translations of all interviews and French writings are my own, except where otherwise noted.
Table 1. New York City neighborhoods
Source: Christopher Hanson-Sanchez, Puerto Rican Specific Data: Institute of Puerto Rican Policy Census Through 1990 (New York: Microdata Supplies, 1995).
Source: Christopher Hanson-Sanchez, Puerto Rican Specific Data: Institute of Puerto Rican Policy Census Through 1990 (New York: Microdata Supplies, 1995).
Source: New York City Health Atlas 1994 (New York: United Hospital Fund, n.d.).
The neighborhoods where I conducted field research in New York were predominantly Puerto Rican, but I argue that the experiences of residents of these neighborhoods is generalizable to residents of other stigmatized minority neighborhoods. First, at the time I conducted field research they were among the poorest neighborhoods in New York. Second, the Puerto Rican experience in New York has been similar to that of African Americans. Both groups have lived in New York City for at least one generation; the largest wave of black and Puerto Rican migrants arrived in the 1950s and early 1960s. Third, and most important for this study, blacks and Puerto Ricans have had similar interactions with police, and most of those killed by the NYPD have been either black or Puerto Rican. As Ramiro Martinez observes,
Table 2. Parisian banlieues, 2009 statistics
Source: Institute National de la statistique et des etudes économiques (INSEE), at the following Web sites: http://www.insee.fr/fr/bases-de-donnees/esl/comparateur.asp?codgeo=com-95585#; http://www.insee.fr/fr/bases-de-donnees/esl/comparateur.asp?codgeo=com-95680; http://www.insee.fr/fr/bases-de-donnees/esl/comparateur.asp?codgeo=com-93014; http://www.insee.fr/fr/bases-de-donnees/esl/comparateur.asp?codgeo=com-93001;http://www.insee.fr/fr/bases-de-donnees/esl/comparateur.asp?codgeo=com-95268; http://www.insee.fr/fr/bases-de-donnees/esl/comparateur.asp?codgeo=cv-9315; http://sig.ville.gouv.fr/zone/3159076; http://www.journaldunet.com/management/ville/.
Scholars have noted that legal cynicism and dissatisfaction with police are both intertwined with levels of neighborhood disadvantage, an effect
