Collective action contexts

1、word count: 13,470constraining the freedom of public assembly: the demeanor of civilians and police behavior in disorderly campus gatherings we thank andrew lindner, lindsay marshall, kristy kaptur and krista pavlish for their invaluable assistance in both helping to develop the coding conventions a

2、nd the coding of the material in the original newspaper stories. thanks, as well to ted burkhard for helping in the early development of the project.john d. mccarthydepartment of sociologypennsylvania state universityuniversity park, pa 16802andrew martindepartment of sociology ohio sta

3、te universitycolumbus, oh 43026clark mcphaildepartment of sociologyuniversity of illinois, urbana-champaignurbana, il 61801constraining the freedom of public assembly: the demeanor of civilians and police behavior in disorderly campus gatheringsabstractcit

4、izens regularly assemble in large numbers in the u.s. for a variety of purposes including convivial gatherings as well as protests. the right to such public assembly is a guarantee of citizenship. and while most of these gatherings remain relatively innocuous, some result in breaches of public order

5、, occasional property damage, and even injuries to participants and bystanders. police have the discretion to use force to disperse public gatherings and this research examines the conditions under which they exercise that discretion. this paper explores police responses to the growing number of dis

6、orderly gatherings that have occurred on college and university campuses in recent decades. using a triangulated search of electronic newspaper data sources, we identify 384 disorderly gatherings in campus communities for the 1985 to 2002 period. examining details of the gatherings, we find that whi

7、le police frequently attempt to disperse disorderly gatherings, they use force in only a small minority of those efforts. we reason that the expectations police bring to protest disturbances are fundamentally different than those they bring to convivial disturbances. our analyses show that police be

8、havior is strongly related to physical violence by civilian participants in both kinds of gatherings; nevertheless, a significant residue of restraint remains in police behavior toward civilians in protest disturbances. however, police are more likely to respond forcefully to physical violence from

9、civilian protesters than they are to civilian participants in convivial disturbances, providing a glimpse at the differing perspectives the police bring to the control of the two kinds of events. in general, the findings suggest that protest events are privileged in practice as well as constitutiona

10、l principle in campus communities, but that when the negotiated trust between police and protesters breaks down police react strongly. we conclude by placing the gatherings we studied into broader historical comparative perspective.constraining the freedom of public assembly: the demeanor of civilia

11、ns and police behavior in disorderly campus gatheringscitizens rights to assemble in public for a variety of purposes, importantly including the right to speak, are not unlimited even in the most democratic states. authorities may, with wide discretion, decide to disperse public gatherings. much of

12、what we know about the use of force and dispersal of public gatherings, however, is based upon the recriminations following notorious instances of dispersal. the extensive public debate that followed, for instance, the events at the 1968 democratic national convention in chicago in 1968 (walker 1968

13、; stark 1972), the “battle in seattle” (smith, 2000), and the “global justice” demonstrations in washington, d.c. in 2000 revolved around the justification and/or proportionality of police behavior in light of the threat to the public order inherent in the behavior of civilian participants in those

14、events. a more systematic evaluation of the variability of police use of force and dispersal across many public gatherings is necessary to understanding how police come to use force to disperse public gatherings.the present research examines features of public gatherings that are related to their di

15、spersal by police. to the extent that police are using their discretion appropriately, the decision to disperse should depend heavily upon the individual and collective demeanor of a gatherings participants, as well as the purpose of the gathering -those including public speech are, in principle, co

16、nstitutionally privileged. we analyze here close to 400 campus community public gatherings for the 1985-2003 period. about 44% of the events included some indication that police attempted to disperse civilian participants, and about 20% of which included the use of physical force by police. campus c

17、ommunities, we will argue, are especially appropriate locations to study this important problem since public gatherings are very common there, as are speech events, and therefore the use of force and crowd dispersal, although rare, is likely to be more frequent in campus communities than other locat

18、ions. the generality of our conclusions beyond campus communities in the u.s. the late 20th century is a question to which we will return in our discussion. the role of discretion in police use of force in public gatheringsthe right of citizens to freely assemble in public places the right of assemb

19、ly, of course, protects the right of citizens to gather together freely in non-public places as well. is generally understood to be one of the key rights of citizenship in democratic polities, along with the rights of a free press and free speech. but the freedom to assemble is not a completely unfe

20、ttered right as there are conditions, even in the most open democratic states, when limits may be placed on that freedom. planned or expected gatherings may be restricted or even forbidden, and participants in gatherings already in progress may be commanded to disperse, and if such a command goes un

21、heeded, be forcibly dispersed with legal justification. authorities and citizen advocates of civil liberties in democratic polities continuously contest the nature of the circumstances under which gatherings may be fettered.in the united states, the theoretical depiction of those circumstances is co

22、ntained in the ongoing judicial interpretation of first amendment constitutional doctrine. these ongoing contests establish the consensus on legal boundaries of authorities ability to restrict public gatherings. in the u.s., the content of speech may not constitute a condition for placing restrictio

23、ns upon the rights of participants in a public gathering, either prior to ones occurrence or during its progress. on the other hand, it is widely understood that time, place and manner restrictions may be imposed on public gatherings prior to their formation. such restrictions are typically negotiat

24、ed in advance in democratic polities, sometimes with lawyers involved in establishing operational boundaries on the limits to assemble in the u.s. and, a series of circumstances any of which may emerge during the progress of a public gathering can provide the rationale for authorities to impose rest

25、rictions upon it or, in the extreme case, command, and if necessary enforce, its dispersal. the decision by authorities to use force in response to provocation during a public gathering, and further to command, and/or enforce, dispersal during its progress is made within a very wide zone of discreti

26、on. if the authorities judge that a gathering creates a threat to the public order, its representatives can command, under the cover of a variety of overlapping laws, participants to disperse. citizens who do not heed such a warning are thereby open to criminal charges of disobeying the command to d

27、isperse as well as, varying from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, a variety of related public order offences (e.g. disorderly conduct, rioting, failure to disperse, breach of peace, criminal mischief, misconduct in an emergency, reckless conduct, reckless conflict, reckless endangerment. each of these

28、charges was brought against civilian participants in one or another of the public assemblies we will analyze below.) such statutes originate in the 18th century british riot act that stated, “if 12 or more people unlawfully assemble and disturb the public peace, they must disperse upon proclamation

29、or be considered guilty of felony,” establishing, according to richard vogler (1991), the doctrine of “guilt by proclamation.”in their defense, however, authorities do have an obligation to maintain the public order, and it is certainly the case that there are situations when civilians taking part i

30、n public gatherings clearly overstep the boundaries of both normatively and legally acceptable behavior. when such activity becomes widespread during a public gathering, neutral observers might agree that such public disorderliness should constitute grounds for some kind of action by authorities. th

31、is is the rationale for granting such wide discretion to the police. on the other hand, ensuring that authorities do not abuse the discretion they have to disperse public gatherings is central to the maintenance of the publics exercise of its first amendment right of assembly. for these reasons, des

32、cribing and understanding how police decide to use force to intervene in and/or to disperse public gatherings constitute important research questions, and, we will argue, are ones that have received, thus far, very little systematic empirical attention. the present research aims to describe how seve

33、ral theoretically important features of public gatherings in conjunction with the behavior of civilian participants are related to the differential likelihood of police use of force in dispersing them. disorderly campus protests and riotous convivial gatherings there exists no commonly accepted term

34、inology for referring to this class of gatherings. we have explored a range of possibilities, including “issueless gathering” (marx, 1970), mixed issue gathering (mccarthy, martin, mcphail and cress, 2002), celebratory riot (ohio state university task force, 2003) and social gathering in hopes of ca

35、pturing the non-instrumental, less organized, aspects of these events in contrast to protest gatherings. calling them convivial gatherings captures, we believe, the more expressive purposes of these events in contrast to the more instrumental nature of protest events, recognizing, of course, that pr

36、otest events also include important elements of social interaction. campus communities in the u.s. are especially useful laboratories for studying the police response to disorderly public gatherings. this is the case because there are a large number of them (nearly 2,000 four year colleges and unive

37、rsities) and many have quite large campus populations (nearly 150 with enrollments over 15,000 in 2003). also, since students as a demographic groups have large blocks of unscheduled time and few if any family responsibilities (mcadam 1986; mcphail and miller 1973; mcphail 1971), they are more avail

38、able to assemble in large numbers on or near their campuses at the noon hour, in the late afternoon and evening, to observe or participate in convivial, sport and political activities. it is important to emphasize that the vast majority of these gatherings never become disorderly, let alone unlawful

39、. for instance, it is well established that only a relatively small percentage of thousands of political protest gatherings in the u.s. (eisinger 1973) as well as in europe (tilly et al 1975; koopmans, 1993; 1995) involve violence against property or person. however, given the frequency with which c

40、onvivial, protest, sport and other gatherings occur in these campus communities, it is more likely that some fraction of them will become disorderly and will therefore come to the attention of campus or community police agencies that may judge them unlawful and possibly use force to disperse some of

41、 the gatherings. we have assembled detailed descriptions of 384 public gatherings that took place in college and university communities between 1985 and 2002. the 208 convivial and 176 protest events were selected on the basis of their high potential for disorderliness (the criteria for selecting th

42、em are described in more detail below). nevertheless, relatively few of these potentially disorderly events (20%) were marked by any physical violence by civilian participants, although property damage was somewhat more common (36%). further, less than one half of all of the gatherings we analyze we

43、re dispersed by police (54% of the convivial and 32% of the protest), and the use of physical force by the police was quite rare (19% of all of the gatherings). we describe several gatherings that are included in our analyses in order to illustrate the variability in police behavior both within and

44、across the two types of events. each of the first pair of events is a convivial gathering sparked by, respectively, a loss and a win in an ncaa national basketball tournament. ann arbor, mi. on april 7, 1992 after the university of michigan basketball team lost its bid for a national championship, p

45、olice in riot gear used tear gas to break up a crowd of 4,000 to 5,000 unruly fans. the police chief said “the drunkest of the bunch assaulted horses and officers.” police on horseback tried to disperse the crowd, some of whom set fires in trash cans and threw rocks and bottles. when that failed to

46、disperse the crowd, officers in riot gear lined up and pushed the crowd back. five people were arrested and three officers were injured.east lansing, mi. late on the evening of april 1, 2000, thirty people were arrested as michigan state basketball fans celebrated the schools victory in the ncaa fin

47、al four semifinals. crowds of people poured out of bars into the streets after the win shouting. people danced, set off fireworks, chanted the msu fight song, waved flags and honked their horns. there were police on every corner, and mounted officers nearby, police assembled from a number of surroun

48、ding jurisdictions. authorities called the celebration calm, and a police representative said, “they were well behaved.”disorderly gatherings like these associated with sports events make up only about 25% of the convivial events we analyze here, yet media images showing police clad in riot gear con

49、fronting inebriated civilians overturning automobiles and dancing around street bonfires have made events like the one in ann arbor emblematic of disorderly convivial events. however, as the east lansing gathering shows, such gatherings do not always result in aggressive police behavior and efforts

50、to disperse celebrating civilians. each of the second pair of events is a protest gathering that occurred in 1986 during the wave of campus events that came to be known as “shantytown protests,” where students erected and occupied symbolic shanty dwellings to call attention to south african aparthei

51、d policies and promote university divestment in companies doing business with the south african regime. (soule, 1997) berkeley, ca. in what university officials said was the most violent confrontation at the university of california since the vietnam war protests of the 1960s, 29 people were injured

52、 and 91 arrested yesterday (april 3, 1986) when baton-swinging police charged a line of about 300 antiapartheid demonstrators who were throwing bottles, rocks and eggs. authorities told protesters the 13 shanties in front of the chancellors office were a fire hazard. an estimated 120 officers, from

53、both campus and surrounding jurisdictions broke through a student barricade to clear the shantytown. after the arrests, campus police razed the shantytown. fighting broke out as demonstrators blocked buses taking arrestees to jail, while police with batons and riot gear cleared a path through the cr

54、owd.college park, md. on april 16, 1986 12 students at the university of maryland were arrested by campus police for erecting a shanty to protest the universitys investment in firms doing business with south africa. refused permission to build the structures, student erected them anyway, and had bee

55、n sleeping in them. the students were arrested without incident and immediately released on their own recognizance. after the students were arrested the shanties were torn down, and 100 students marched across campus to the chancellors office to protest.a large proportion of the disorderly protest g

56、atherings included in our analyses are marked by acts of civil disobedience of one kind or another. the police response to such acts can vary dramatically as the contrast between these two shantytown protests illustrates. in both the berkeley shantytown protest and the ann arbor post-ncaa tournament

57、 confrontation, police and civilian participants behaved violently, and subsequently representatives of each side accused the other of being responsible for the escalation. this illustrates nicely the ambiguities involved in making causal interpretations about the interactions between police and civ

58、ilian participants in disorderly gatherings, an issue we will discuss in more detail below.figure 1 plots the trend for the two types of disorderly gatherings we have identified over the eighteen- year period we examine here. figure 1 about here although there is significant annual fluctuation, the

59、smoothed trends in this figure show that prevalence of disorderly convivial events was growing rapidly during this period while disorderly protests events were declining slightly in number.explaining police use of force, crowd dispersal and arrestsour theoretical perspective on the policing of public gatherings views police behaviors as the contingent products of the on