University of California-Berkeley
Protest movements pose a significant challenge to city governments and police departments, who respond in a variety of ways. This research asks why, how, and when city and police responses to social movements vary. Past research on protest policing identified three main factors that determine how police manage protest: the governing context under which police operate, police departments' cultures and their capacities, and the characteristics and activities of the protest movements. But to date, no consensus has emerged as to which of these different factors matters most in determining protest policing, nor under what circumstances. It has been very difficult to compare the policing of one protest movement to the policing of another because they usually feature different aims, strategies, and tactics. That difficulty is compounded if the contexts in which protest policing occurs differ considerably. With so much variability, the conclusions of comparative studies often contradict one another, and findings cannot be generalized across movements and locations.
This dissertation project will use the multiple instances of the Occupy movement to complete a comparative study of protest policing. The researchers will analyze police interactions with the Occupy movement in over 200 cities. Specifically, data describing protest policing tactics will be analyzed to study whether police departments use a wide array of approaches over the course of a protest campaign or just one or two signature sets of tactics. The researchers will also study the effects of the governing context, police characteristics, and movement's characteristics on police handling of protests over the course of protest campaigns -- questions untestable with existing data, which lack detailed information on the timing of events.
Broader Impact
In the last two years, a wave of protest has swept the world: The Arab Spring, the Occupy movement, anti-austerity rioting in England, police and protester clashes in Spain and Greece, and labor unrest in China. There is good reason to believe that the outcomes of such protest movements depend, in part, on the ways in which they are policed. But researchers, to date, are unable to satisfactorily explain why police respond to protest movements as they do. This research aims to explain the dynamics of protester/police interactions to inform strategies that people and their governments may take to avoid unnecessary escalations, distrust, and negative policing and protest movement outcomes. _______________________________________________________________________
vary. Past research on protest policing identified three main factors that determine how police manage protest: the governing context under which police operate, police departments' cultures and their capacities, and the characteristics and activities of the protest movements. But to date, no consensus has emerged as to which of these different factors matters most in determining protest policing, nor under what circumstances. It has been very difficult to compare the policing of one protest movement to the policing of another because they usually feature different aims, strategies, and tactics. That difficulty is compounded if the contexts in which protest policing occurs differ considerably. With so much variability, the conclusions of comparative studies often contradict one another, and findings cannot be generalized across movements and locations. This dissertation project uses nearly 200 instances of the Occupy movement in the United States to create a database enabling comparative study of protest policing. Construction of that very large and detailed database is well under way. So far, researchers have classified the text in over 8000 news articles and set up a web-based system whereby internet users can help classify the text in even more detail. Computer algorithms augment and optimize this workflow. This pioneering research approach will produce a database of protester and police interactions that is richer in detail and more transparent than existing databases. The software tools created by the team to generate this database will also be made available to the research community so that other research teams may undertake their own database-creation projects. Once their own database is complete, researchers on this project will analyze police interactions with the Occupy movement across the United States. They will report findings indicating whether police departments use a wide array of approaches to movements over the course of a protest campaign or just one or two signature sets of tactics. They will show how the governing context, police characteristics, movement's characteristics, and on-the-ground interactions influence police handling of protests over the course of protest campaigns -- questions untestable with existing data, which lack detailed information on the timing of events. The potential impacts of this research for the public and research community are noteworthy. In the last three years, a wave of protest has swept the world: The Arab Spring, the Occupy movement, anti-austerity rioting in England, police and protester clashes in Spain and Greece, labor unrest in China, and civil strife in Ukraine. This project will contribute to a ‘common sense’ about how chains of interaction lead to violence or negotiation so that actors in future episodes of political contention will be held to higher standards of conduct. The tools the researchers are developing, too, will allow other scholars to gain more and better data from text faster, potentially unlocking the information embedded in increasingly massive digital archives. Interested parties should expect the release of an open database, software tools, research publications, and a book over the next several months.
