and political economies. Police use violence against subjugated minorities in both cities, but in one city subjugated minorities, particularly poor minority youths, respond in ways that sometimes culminate in full-fledged riots. In the other, subjugated minorities and victims of police abuse more often engage in conventional forms of individual and collective action, organizing protest marches and civil disobedience; petitioning district attorneys, federal prosecutors, political officeholders, and members of the Department of Justice; and filing civil law suits.
In 1964 riots broke out in New York when a) police violence was ignored and unofficially encouraged; b) mass migration, white flight, urban renewal programs, and highway construction devastated black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods, overwhelming the capacity of black and Puerto Rican organizations to channel anger into sustained nonviolent action; and c) blacks and Latinos were largely denied access to local courts, civilian review boards, or other forms of legal redress. Riots broke out in 2005 in Paris when a) growing police violence against blacks and Arabs was officially ignored and unofficially encouraged; b) the discourse of republican equality did not allow open discussion of racial dynamics, much less the development of civil and social organizations to address these dynamics; c) revolutionary organizations such as the Front de Libération Nationale (National Liberation Front of Algeria, or FLN) had long ceased to exist; d) courts refused to hold police officers accountable for violence used against North and sub-Saharan African immigrants or black and Arab youths, and those who charged police officers with civil offenses were far more likely to be sentenced for rebellion than to win their cases.
The structure of policing shaped the geography of urban unrest. In the United States, the decentralized structure of the police, with each unit under the control of a local mayor, led to a segmented, staggered pattern of riots during the 1960s, which crisscrossed the country for half a decade. Riots erupted most violently in Los Angeles, Detroit, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Newark, cities where residential patterns were most segregated and police abuse most profuse. By the late 1970s riots had become rare. Still in some cases—most notably Liberty City, Florida, in 1980 and Los Angeles in 1992, where racial boundaries were particularly contentious and where police operated with virtual impunity—they reoccurred. Yet even those extremely damaging riots were isolated geographically, as the federal government intervened to subdue the rioters and hold local police accountable for their actions.
In France, in contrast, the centralized structure of policing produced a different pattern of urban unrest. Since the police were national, it was the national government that determined local reactions. The centralized structure of policing ensured, as Katz observes, that “[a]ntagonism towards the police reinforce[d] the distrust of the national government…. [In 2005] their protests, neither planned nor coordinated, reflected frustration, rage, alienation, and a lack of confidence in or access to official political channels. In this they resembled African Americans in the 1960s more than immigrants to the United States late in the twentieth century.”107 When then minister of the interior Nicolas Sarkozy announced on the radio that “his police had done nothing wrong” and threatened to take action against delinquents and hooligans, he provoked rapid riot contagion throughout France within days of his statement.
The logic of inquiry, as Gary Goertz and James Mahoney note, is looking for the “cause of effects” (starting with real events and moving backward).108 Three elements, I argue, are present in most ghetto riots: activated categorical boundaries; violent transgressions across categorical boundaries by police or other security forces (or vigilantes protected by security forces) usually leading to the death of an unarmed youth (in interethnic riots the violence transgression is committed by members of dominant groups; in opportunistic riots, a pattern of violence against subordinate groups is suddenly disrupted when the repressive capacity of the state precipitously declines); and failure of state officials to hold police or security forces accountable. These three variables combined make riots more likely.
A wider array and combination of variables avert riots. The explanation is asymmetric, as Goertz and Mahoney observe of most explanations in qualitative research: “The causes of failure outcomes are not necessarily equivalent to the absence or negation of the causes of success outcome.”109 American scholars have attributed the decline of riots to a host of factors. On the one hand, the expansion of Great Society programs, the election of blacks to political office, and the integration of police departments are said to have co-opted activists and deactivated racial boundaries. On the other hand, the decline of riots has been attributed to the mass incarceration of black and, to a somewhat lesser degree, Latino males. As Pamela Oliver notes, “The crucial thing to understand is that a repressive strategy initially triggered by massive urban unrest and other social movements was maintained and expanded long after the riots abated. It was not aimed at preventing unrest by repressing riots: it was preventing unrest by repressing potential rioters. People were not arrested and incarcerated for dissent or even for rioting: they were arrested and incarcerated for crimes.”110 Mass incarceration prevented riots, she notes, “by removing people from the system before they commit[ed] the undesired action.”111
While all of these factors may have reduced the likelihood of riots, none of these explanations answers our puzzle. The first set of factors has deactivated racial boundaries in many cities but does not explain why riots did not erupt in New York during the 1990s despite escalating racial tensions and police violence, when a white mayor, a white administration, and a white police force held sway. Similarly, mass incarceration may have devastated inner-city neighborhoods but cannot account for either the sharp decline in riot frequency since the mid to late 1970s (long before the massive climb in incarceration rates) or the mammoth explosion in 1992 in Los Angeles (when California incarceration rates were substantially higher than the average and New York’s were substantially lower). Indeed, California, having one of the higher incarceration rates in the country, is among the most riot-prone states, perhaps due to the devastating impact that mass incarceration has had on activist networks.
Two factors have received far less attention but have transformed the way in which blacks and Latinos in New York, and in much of the rest of the nation, now respond to police homicides. Together they have dramatically reduced the likelihood of riots. First, social movements born in the cauldron of the great race riots of the 1960s now intentionally and unintentionally channel anger into more organized forms of collective action. Social movements provide a standard repertoire of action. Activists who had cut their teeth on the great race riots of the 1960s led black and Puerto Rican power movements in the 1970s and in the 1980s formed networks of community-based organizations on once riot-strewn streets. By the 1990s they were organizing around a host of critical local issues: struggles over control of local school and area policy boards; the creation of joint planning councils; and the availability of low-income housing and community gardens. In addition they organized against racial profiling and police brutality. Gregg Carter claims that the riots stopped because “you can only burn down your neighborhood so many times.”112 Similarly a neighborhood activist on the Lower East Side told me, “If you look at areas like Watts and Newark, they are still rebuilding from the riots that took place then.” To a certain extent that is true, but other avenues had to become available. Now when police kill, activists and social movement organizations converge. They give solace to the families and friends, lead mass marches, demand indictments and federal interventions if those fail, and help families file civil suits. Some even sit on civilian review boards.
Second, the passage of significant civil rights laws has opened the courts to black and Latino plaintiffs and made the federal government a potential ally.113 “Victims of discrimination,” note Rogers Smith and Desmond King, increasingly seek “relief in the federal courts.”114 Courtroom battles have replaced street struggles. Demands for individual reparations have replaced demands for social justice. Not-guilty verdicts in criminal trials for homicide are not the end of the road. The Justice Department can try police officers for the violation of victims’ civil rights. Families frequently file civil suits. Between 1977 and 1998 only three New York City police officers were convicted for homicide while on duty.115 Yet during the 1990s New York spent approximately twenty-five million dollars
