attitudes towards the police even after controlling for neighborhood violent crime rates. Moreover, ecological characteristics of policing also include the use of physical and deadly force at the city level, officer misconduct in police precincts and slower response times in communities highlighting research that attitudes towards the policing may be a function of a neighborhood context and even determinants in police killings.135
My work thus addresses an important lacuna in research on ethnicity, policing, and riots. As Martinez notes, “The scarcity of research on Latinos and policing is one of the most enduring shortcomings in the development of race/ethnicity and the criminal justice system scholarship.”136
Moreover the categorical boundaries that New York police use to classify populations locate both blacks and Puerto Ricans on the same side of a racial divide, in diametric opposition to the city’s white populations. Police in France do the same with blacks and Arabs. As Tilly observes, “Durable inequality among categories arises because people who control access to value-producing resources solve pressing organizational problems by means of categorical distinctions. For these reasons, inequalities by race, gender, ethnicity class, age, citizenship, educational level and other apparently contradictory principles of differentiation form through similar social processes and are to an important degree organizationally interchangeable.”137
Organization of the Book
In Chapter 1 I look at the construction of racial boundaries in the United States and the violent policing of those boundaries as large waves of black migrants from the South and Puerto Ricans arrived in New York City. I trace the processes that sparked riots in 1935; in 1943; most significantly in 1964, when conflicts in New York initiated a chain of riots throughout the country; and again in 1967, when predominantly Puerto Rican East Harlem and South Bronx burst into flames. I also introduce the three neighborhoods of Mott Haven, South Bronx; Williamsburg, Brooklyn; and the Lower East Side of Manhattan (the section popularly called Alphabet City by Anglos and Loisaida by Latinos), and I track them from their founding to the macroeconomic restructuring of the late 1950s and early 1960s, the race riots of 1964 and 1967, the radical black and Puerto Rican organizing efforts from 1969 to 1973, and the immensely destructive 1977 blackout riots. I conclude this chapter by discussing the 1989 election of David Dinkins, the first African American mayor of New York, and contrasting the dynamic that led to the 1992 Rodney King riot in Los Angeles with that which prevented a small, but similar riot in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan from exploding into a citywide conflagration the same year.
In Chapter 2 I examine the construction of racial boundaries in France and the policing of those boundaries in Paris from the occupation of Algeria and the creation of a French/Muslim racial boundary through the creation of the “North African brigades” and the violent slaughter of unarmed Algerian protesters in 1961 to violent attacks by dominant groups and police on black and Arab youths. This chapter concludes with the 2002 presidential race and the strong first-round near win of the racist National Front candidate Jean Marie Le Pen.
In Chapter 3 I pose the following question: why, when so many of the worst aspects of 1960s race relations remained in New York City between 1990 and 2001—a white mayor, impoverished and still mostly segregated black and Latino neighborhoods, racially coded law-and-order rhetoric, and violent racially biased policing—did neighborhoods not burn? I begin by analyzing the 1993 mayoral race and the way that campaign activated racial boundaries in New York. I then look at boundary activation from the perspective of the police officers whom I interviewed, including those who worked in the three neighborhoods, those who worked in the city at large, those of minority extraction, and those police officers and chiefs active in efforts to promote police reform nationally. From there I shift to neighborhood organizing efforts in the 1980s and 1990s, building on interviews I conducted with black and Puerto Rican activists and residents of Mott Haven, Williamsburg, and the Lower East Side and with leaders of anti-police-brutality organizations (many of whom were radical activists in the early 1970s and continue to live in these three neighborhoods). I conclude this chapter with the stories of four mothers and one father of young people killed by police (Nicholas Heyward, Amadou Diallo, Anthony Rosario, Malcolm Ferguson, and Timur Person) and their efforts to pursue justice for their children and to prevent others from suffering a similar fate.
In Chapter 4 I trace the processes and mechanisms that led Paris to burn for three consecutive weeks in November 2005. I use extensive interviews with French police, with the families of boys killed by police, and with residents of Sarcelles; Garges-lès-Gonesse; Villiers-le-Bel; Aubervilliers, Clichy-sous-Bois; and Cité des Bosquets, Montfermeil, to explore that dynamic. Lastly, I contrast the situation in Parisian banlieues with that in the impoverished neighborhoods of northern Marseille, where riots did not erupt.
In the Conclusion I discuss changes in policing politics in New York and Paris since 2005 and reexamine my main theoretical claims in light of the evidence of the two cases. Finally, I delve into the implications of this analysis for understanding more recent riots in Europe and elsewhere.
Chapter 1
Policing Racial Boundaries and Riots in New York (1920–1993)
The Great Migration, which began in 1916, brought half a million blacks north. The boll weevil had ruined the southern cotton harvest, wiped out white landowners, dried up credit, and forced black sharecroppers and tenant farmers into debt. The simultaneous decline of King Cotton and the advent of World War I freed blacks from coerced farm labor in the South. Puerto Ricans arrived around the same time. In 1917 the Jones Act had made Puerto Ricans U.S. citizens eligible for both the draft and stateside migration to escape rural poverty. New York labor scouts (anxious to fill war-time shortages) scoured the South and Puerto Rico, recruiting and transporting workers north “in consignments running high into the hundreds.”1 The new migrants found housing in the Lower East Side, Central Harlem, San Juan Hill, Hell’s Kitchen, and Greenwich Village.
In this chapter I track the history of New York City’s black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods, paying particular attention to the construction of ghettos, the policing of racial and spatial boundaries, and the relationship between racial polarization, police violence, and urban unrest in the riots of 1935, 1943, 1964, 1967, 1977, 1991, and 1992. I also introduce three New York City neighborhoods: Mott Haven in the South Bronx; Williamsburg in Brooklyn; and the Lower East Side of Manhattan. I conducted ethnographic field research in these neighborhoods between May 1993 and September 1996. I trace the development of these neighborhoods from the time of the Great Migration to the riots of the late 1960s. This is followed by a look at the radical organizing efforts of the early 1970s, the eruption of riots in 1977 after widespread power outages (called the “blackout riots”), and the decline of radical organizing efforts after 1977. By the 1990s, I argue, radical black and Puerto Rican activists had turned their energies to community organizing around neighborhood needs and against police brutality. Together they knit the frayed fabric of their communities and developed an established repertoire of contention that intentionally and unintentionally made riots less probable.
The Great Depression and Communist Cross-Racial Organizing in New York
Unlike in many cities where brutal mobs drove black residents into undesirable areas on the outskirts, black and Puerto Rican migrants found housing in inner-city New York. Harlem, in particular, was centrally located and a chosen destination for many migrants. In 1900, when blacks made up less than 2 percent of the city’s population, white race riots led them to concentrate in Harlem,
