5) poor recreational facilities and programs; 6) ineffectiveness of the political structure and grievance mechanisms; 7) disrespectful white attitudes; 8) discriminatory administration of justice; 9) inadequacy of federal programs; 10) inadequacy of municipal services; 11) discriminatory consumer and credit practices; and 12) inadequate welfare programs.37 Of those grievances, numbers 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12 are arguably worse today, while neighborhoods are quiescent. Their most cited grievance—police practices—was given the least attention and led to the least reform, while the change in grievance mechanisms (number 6) may be the single best explanation for the lack of riots today.
It is unlikely that extreme deprivation caused the riots. Susan Olzak and her coauthors, in a massive multiple regression of 1,770 racial and ethnic collection action events and 154 race riots in the United States between 1960 and 1993, found little evidence that riots were caused by extreme deprivation. Instead they found that riots occurred where the situations for blacks were improving, where neighborhoods had become less segregated, and where poverty had begun to decline.38 Riots erupt when life improves for the poor and oppressed, they argue—an equally questionable conclusion.39
The conclusions reached by the Kerner Commission were too limited. The riots were triggered not simply by weeks or months of tension-producing incidents but by a long history of violent policing of racial boundaries that had only intensified in the civil rights era. In a prescient study of seventy-five riots that erupted in black neighborhoods between 1913 and 1963, Stanley Lieberson and Arnold Silverman found that in those cities where ghetto residents rioted, blacks had lower rates of unemployment, better jobs, and higher wages and the wage differential between blacks and whites was smaller.40 Yet it was not the improvements, they insisted, that precipitated the riots. It was police violence. Moreover, in those cities where ghetto riots erupted 1) the police force was white; 2) the local government was white, elected through a system “less sensitive to the demands of the electorate”; and 3) the businesses community was white.
Local government, they pointed out, is “one of the most important institutions to consider in an analysis of race riots. Municipal policies, particularly with respect to police, can greatly influence the chances of a race riot.”41 Riots are “more likely to occur where social institutions function inadequately, or when grievances cannot be resolved, or resolved under the existing institutional arrangements … such that a disadvantaged segment is unable to obtain recognition of its interests and concerns through normal political channels.”42 In other words, Lieberson and Silverman’s findings coincided with number 1 and number 6 of the Kerner Commission’s list of twelve grievances.
In 1970, Harlan Hahn and Joe Feagan reported similar findings in their study of riots in New York and Detroit. With “few exceptions, every major incident of urban violence was triggered by police…. it is likely that hostility of Negroes towards white authority has been kindled by abrasive contacts with ghetto police.”43 Similarly, Robert Fogelson found that “with a few exceptions … the nineteen sixties riots were all precipitated by police actions.”44 Yet none of these authors produced a full-length book on police riots, or on the interaction between the two; and no one attempted to generalize these findings and apply them to riots outside the United States.
The Kerner Commission findings were clearly overdetermined. Lieberson and Silverman’s, Hahn and Feagan’s, and Fogelson’s findings, on the other hand, were drawn from studies of American cities that had similar characteristics. It was difficult to know if their findings were replicable in a different context. A cursory examination of riots in Great Britain, however, gives some added support to their conclusions. Before I turn to studies of riots in Great Britain, however, I consider a final study of the American riots, one that provides a clue as to why some residents and not others respond to police violence with riotous actions.
In 1968 Edward Ransford conducted a survey of residents of the Los Angeles Watts neighborhood, many of whom had participated in the 1965 riots. All residents surveyed expressed an overwhelming sense of powerlessness born of “extreme discrimination barriers … a belief that all channels for social redress are closed.”45 Although black militants shared this sense of political powerlessness, they exhibited a much lower level of individual powerlessness. Melvin Seeman later theorized that the black militants Ransford studied were less likely to riot because activism had enhanced their sense of self-worth: “The militants [were less] likely to be low in powerlessness when this refers to their sense of personal efficacy but high in powerlessness in the sense of being aware of (and fighting against) blocked social control (discrimination and bureaucratic arrangements).”46 While both Seeman and Ransford stress the importance of personal efficacy in dissuading black militants from participation in riots, there is another explanation: Black activists participated in organizations that both prized disciplined strategic action and offered an alternative repertoire to pursue justice. Participation in successful collective actions increased activists’ confidence in their own collective capacity and made them less susceptible to the pull of flaming streets.
British Police Studies
Not long after race-related riots declined in the United States, the first major riots erupted in Great Britain. They began innocuously enough when in March 1981, following the “Black People’s Day of Action” parade, conflicts between police and predominantly black youths burst forth into small-scale confrontations. At the beginning of April, the metropolitan police initiated Operation Swamp 81, a campaign that included a massive sweep of the black neighborhood Brixton. Over 1,000 men were stopped and frisked in a matter of days. On April 10, police chased a badly bleeding young black man who had passed by them apparently after having been stabbed by a group of boys. When a police officer tried to take the wounded youth to a waiting car (allegedly to get him to a hospital), a crowd gathered to protect the young man. The officer called for police backup. Rumors began to spread that the police had let the youth die in custody, and the crowd began to turn on them. As more backup police arrived, young people pelted them with bricks and bottles. Lootings and then fires followed. In two days 28 buildings and 120 cars were set aflame and 117 stores were damaged and/or looted. Before the riots ended, 65 civilians and 229 police officers were injured.
Then in July riots tore through Handsworth, Birmingham; Southall, London; Toxteth, Liverpool; Moss Side, Manchester; Leeds and Leicester; Halifax in Southampton; Bedford in Gloucester; Wolverhampton and Coventry; and Bristol and Edinburgh. A national commission was formed to look into the cause of the riots. The official report of the commission, known as the Scarman Report after the presiding magistrate, determined that the riots “were not planned but a spontaneous outburst of built-up resentment sparked by particular incidents, … a loss of confidence and mistrust in the police and their methods of policing, … and racial disadvantage and racial discrimination.”47
In 1985 a new wave of violent confrontations between black youths and white police officers tore through Brixton, the Handsworth suburb of Birmingham, the West Midland areas of Coventry and Wolverhampton, and then the St. Paul’s district of Bristol after a black taxi driver was arrested by a white police officer for a parking ticket. The worst riots occurred in the mostly black Broadwater Farm housing estate in the predominantly white Tottenham district of London. Residents complained that police had occupied the area and harassed, abused, and otherwise treated violently and disrespectfully the area’s residents. Police shot rioters with plastic bullets, and the police constable Keith Blakelock was murdered with a machete. Another 20 civilians and 223 police officers were injured.48 The 1985 riots, like the preceding 1981 riots, had come on the heels of a spectacular rise in repressive drug and street crime policing.
The two waves of riots acted as a catalyst, generating a surge of new research. They also shifted the direction of the field from a highly theoretical academic discipline to a broader policy-oriented one. Most studies, however, continued to focus on the micro-processes and institutional culture of the police, a methodological approach heavily reliant on participant observation. David Waddington, Simon Holdaway, Clive
