Police Response To Riots

This book is a study of the response that the police take to modern urban riots. It takes a principally police perspective on the lead-up to a riot, the police response, and the evaluation of the police response. The book is based on the development and analysis of four extensive case study riots: France 2005, London 2011, Ferguson 2014, and Baltimore 2015. The methodological approach to the case studies is comparative and includes an interactive framework that incorporates a number of key variables. These variables examine how each riot began, how they developed, the response strategies and tactics used by the police, and how the riots eventually ended. The first section looks at defining riots and examines the riot literature and research to date. The second section analyses the current police response to rioting. The third and final section includes an analysis and comparison of the case study riots, along with an examination of how the police response to riots could be improved. With its focus on police practices, this unique volume will be useful for researchers, students, police, law enforcement, and policy makers.

Having long been a neglected issue, the policing of protest began to attract considerable attention in the 1990s, climaxing in the events in Seattle of 1999. These protests and the changing political climate since September 11, 2001 mean that a new cycle of protest is challenging the concept of law and order and civil liberties. This book examines how new policing styles are developing using case studies from North America and Europe. The volume brings together researchers from a number of disciplines - sociology, criminology, political science and mass communication - who focus on new forms of political protest, policing and public order.

Reflected almost daily in headlines, the enormous rift between the police and the communities they serve¿especially African American communities¿remains one of the major challenges facing the United States. And race-related riots continue to be a violent manifestation of that rift. Can this dismal state of affairs be changed? Can the distrust between black citizens and the police ever be transformed into mutual respect? Howard Rahtz addresses this issue, first tracing the history of race riots in the US and then drawing on both the lessons of that history and his own first-hand experience to offer a realistic approach for developing and maintaining a police force that is a true community partner. Howard Rahtz served for nearly two decades with the Cincinnati Police Department, retiring in 2007 as commander of the Vice Control Unit. He currently teaches at police academies in the area and speaks nationally on police reform. He is the author of Community Policing: A Handbook and Understanding Police Use of Force.

Three weeks after Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a New York City police officer shot and killed a fifteen-year-old black youth, inciting the first of almost a decade of black and Latino riots throughout the United States. In October 2005, French police chased three black and Arab teenagers into an electrical substation outside Paris, culminating in the fatal electrocution of two of them. Fires blazed in Parisian suburbs and housing projects throughout France for three consecutive weeks. Cathy Lisa Schneider explores the political, legal, and economic conditions that led to violent confrontations in neighborhoods on opposite sides of the Atlantic half a century apart. Police Power and Race Riots traces the history of urban upheaval in New York and greater Paris, focusing on the interaction between police and minority youth. Schneider shows that riots erupted when elites activated racial boundaries, police engaged in racialized violence, and racial minorities lacked alternative avenues of redress. She also demonstrates how local activists who cut their teeth on the American race riots painstakingly constructed social movement organizations with standard nonviolent repertoires for dealing with police violence. These efforts, along with the opening of access to courts of law for ethnic and racial minorities, have made riots a far less common response to police violence in the United States today. Rich in historical and ethnographic detail, Police Power and Race Riots offers a compelling account of the processes that fan the flames of urban unrest and the dynamics that subsequently quell the fires.

This groundbreaking history of how American police forces have been militarized is now revised and updated. Newly added material brings the story through 2020, including analysis of the Ferguson protests, the Obama and Trump administrations, and the George Floyd protests. The last days of colonialism taught America’s revolutionaries that soldiers in the streets bring conflict and tyranny. As a result, our country has generally worked to keep the military out of law enforcement. But over the last two centuries, America’s cops have increasingly come to resemble ground troops. The consequences have been dire: the home is no longer a place of sanctuary, the Fourth Amendment has been gutted, and police today have been conditioned to see the citizens they serve as enemies. In Rise of the Warrior Cop, Balko shows how politicians’ ill-considered policies and relentless declarations of war against vague enemies like crime, drugs, and terror have blurred the distinction between cop and soldier. His fascinating, frightening narrative that spans from America’s earliest days through today shows how a creeping battlefield mentality has isolated and alienated American police officers and put them on a collision course with the values of a free society.