PI: Dale W. Wimberley Co-PI: Thomas N. Ratliff Institution: Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
This project tests dominant approaches to protest event analysis, presenting an integrated model identifying the conditions for violent protests in the U.S. from 1989-2009. It addresses the following questions: What tactics do police tend to use against certain forms of protest? What protester performances and policing styles tend to intersect violently? Do certain social movements disproportionately encounter violent repression? How do countermovements and their ?counter? performances at protest events contribute to violence? Data will be collected on protest events and law enforcement characteristics from Census Data, City and County Data Books, the Department of Justice, and four major U.S. newspapers.
Broader Impacts: This project will inform activists about strategies for expressing dissent while avoiding significant confrontations that pose the risk of becoming violent. This research also addresses how certain policing styles may influence levels of violence at protests, thereby providing insights for police on how to avoid violent confrontations at protest events.
Under what conditions does social protest turn violent? The images held in the collective memory of many Americans or even "common sense" notions of what occurs at protest events—be it the actions of protesters or police officers—often include violence. People who participate in protest events are often viewed as violent mobs, agitators, and dangerous riff-raff. This empirically inaccurate view of social protest casts its net broadly over "professional" activists, religious leaders, mothers, school children, and union members, to name only a few. Likewise, police behavior is often cast as "repression," neglecting the fact that most of the time police do not even show up at protest events. In fact, my research suggests a much different picture of social protest in the United States—a portrait of mostly peaceful control and dissent where just over six percent of social protests have any form of violence at all, be it from protesters, counterprotesters, or police. Thus, we must understand the dynamics of violence at these events in a much more detailed fashion. Scholars of social movements have contended that considerable research on protest policing has been done, but research testing multiple theories in recent decades is lacking. To resolve this gap in our knowledge, this study builds on previous research to identify factors influencing police behavior and violent outcomes at social protests in the United States from 2006-2009. In particular, I examine the conditions in which police are present at events and make arrests, as well as when police use combinations of arrest, physical force, and violent force. I also examine the conditions where protesters, counterprotesters, and/or police commit some act of violence. I identify four components of the protest event which influence these outcomes—actors (e.g., types of protesters and counterprotesters), enemies (e.g., the target of protesters’ claims), the stage (e.g., qualities of place and space where a protest occurs), and protest performance (e.g., protest size and specific tactics employed by people at a protest event). Thus, this research focuses on how qualities of police, protester, and counterprotester actions intersect to influence behavior at protest events. Data on protest events for this project were collected from content analysis of three U.S. newspapers—The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Los Angeles Times, and New York Times—from 2006-2009. Of the nearly 20,000 newspaper articles examined for this project, nearly 4,000 social protests were identified. In some instances the results of this study show that certain characteristics leading to police presence and violent behavior by some party at social protests in the U.S. persist from research conducted on earlier decades—the presence of counterprotesters, protester use of "more confrontational" tactics like civil disobedience, and/or when protesters use multiple tactics, thereby making the event more difficult to police or giving some impression of disorder. However, my findings also contradict previous studies, because I find that: (1) larger protests are less likely to be policed aggressively or result in violence; (2) police do not necessarily "target" protests that are challenging the authority of the government or economic interests; and, (3) specific social movements—Peace, Tea Party, Economic Justice, Nature and Environment, Human and Civil Rights—and tactics—civil disobedience, rallies, and marches—influence police behavior and protest event outcomes differently and to different degrees. In sum, this project’s intellectual merits include: (1) the extension of our knowledge regarding social protest in recent years as well as the theories we use to understand them, and (2) providing a database for future research on data collection methods for protest event analysis. This project will have broader impacts influencing policy analysis, policing, and social protest. It will inform activists about strategies for expressing dissent while avoiding significant confrontations that pose the risk of becoming violent. This research also addresses how police respond to detailed protest situations, thereby providing insights for police on how to avoid violent confrontations at protest events. This project will also influence how we teach about the history of important social movements continuing to advance the interests of women, racial or ethnic minorities, and other marginalized groups in education, the workplace, and everyday life.
