Policy spillover and the policing of protest in New York City, 1960–2006

Abstract

Scholars have suggested that the policing of protest have become more permissive in Western democracies since the 1960s. While widely accepted, studies affirming a softening of police conduct have focused on national trends despite awareness that police tactics have unevenly diffused across the USA. This study examines the temporal trends in protest policing in New York City to evaluate how and why the dominant strategies of protest control have changed over time. Drawing on the widespread privatisation of public space in New York during the 1980s coupled with the adoption of Broken Windows crime control strategies, I develop an alternative explanation of the temporal dynamics of protest policing that is based on policy spillover, or the unintentional spillover effects that policy decisions unrelated to protest policing may nonetheless have on police conduct. Using a sample of 6147 protest events occurring in New York between 1960 and 2006, I confirm that the prevalence of arrests and other forms of police force have increased over time even though illegal or other contentious tactics have declined. The results additionally do not suggest that there is a direct relationship between crime rates and either arrests or the use of force. In regards to protest policing, the political construction and control of crime and disorder are more important than the absolute amount of crime, which is consistent with the proposed policy spillover explanation.