By Iman Said

In 2020, the United States was gripped by three parallel social movements: an outrush of support for the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement after the murder of George Floyd, discontent regarding state-mandated lockdowns to mitigate the coronavirus-19 pandemic, and allegations of voter fraud after the November elections. Together, these movements generated a historic spike in protest activity that garnered significant attention, leading some to argue that the police had behaved disparately at protests associated with BLM compared with the other two. A dense literature in the early 2000s developed protest policing theories that pointed to policing culture or to racial threat theory to account for variation in police behavior, but how these theories account for protest policing during 2020 is unclear. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative data and methods from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data set, I first examine allegations of racial discrimination in police behavior at protests. Then, I explore how on-the-ground interactions between police and protestors account for any seeming disparity. I demonstrate distinct patterns of police behavior shaped by different protestor behaviors across these social movements, as well as racial animus. These findings extend and clarify current theories of protest policing.

Criminology, Volume 63, Issue 2 May 2025 Pages 303-329

MAY CONTAIN MARKUP

STANLEY H. PALMER

PREFACE: This book seeks to right an imbalance and recognize a contribution. The imbalance is the result of two decades of scholarship on English popular protest; the contribution, that of Ireland to British police history. Thanks to pioneering work in the 1960s by Eric Hobsbawm, George Rudé, and Edward Palmer Thompson, work that has been ably continued by succeeding generations of graduate students, historians have made a quantum leap in our knowledge of the motivations and aims, composition and tactics, of crowds and protesters in Georgian and carly Victorian England. By contrast, we still know little about the other side of the confrontation, the forces of order. The result has been an emerging, indeed a growing imbalance in our knowledge about crowds and the authorities. ..”

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS. CAMBRIDGE NEW YORK NEW ROCHELLE MELBOURNE SYDNEY. 1988. 840p.