The banner versus the baton: Explaining protest policing inthe United States, 1960-1975

Abstract

Research on repression and protest policing has increasingly attempted to unpack the social, political and cultural factors that affect the policing of public protest events. This dissertation contributes to that collective scholastic enterprise by examining protest policing in the United States, and particularly within New York State, from 1960 to 1975. However, unlike existing "static" approaches, which largely focus on protest and protester characteristics, and existing "dynamic" approaches, which focus on the changing interests of political elites, this dissertation argues that students of protest control must examine the independent causal effects of the agents of repression. In the U.S., this leads to an emphasis on local, civilian law enforcement agencies, culminating in this dissertation in a "police-centered" approach. Using quantitative analyses including logistic, multinomial logistic and negative binomial regressions, this dissertation evaluates the explanatory power of existing approaches to protest policing in addition to elements of a police-centered approach. Findings reveal that some existing approaches to protest policing, such as the threat approach, provide important explanatory leverage. However, other approaches such as weakness received only mixed support and still others such as the threat and weakness interaction approach and stable political opportunity structures approach received no support. As well, the volatile political opportunities approach received only limited support. The same models also evaluate three prongs of the police-centered approach and find significant support for new "police threat" hypotheses with more mixed support for the effects of police agency and police field characteristics. In addition to these theoretically important findings, the quantitative models also innovate where measurement and modeling is concerned. Qualitative analyses further develop on the police-centered perspective by examining the development of and competition between approaches to protest policing in the 1960s and 1970s. Using new institutionalist theory, this dissertation focuses on internal and external institutional forces in explaining the rise of and competition between protest policing approaches. Specifically, four key institutions are discussed: policing, professionalism, law-making, and protest. While all of these institutions exerted important influences on the development of and/or competition between approaches, the professional reform movement within policing played a critical role.