That number was exceeded in less than a decade, and by the s it had doubled. The overcrowding was accompanied by a woefully inadequate number of correctional officers, and when two of them were attacked in the prison cafeteria, things spiraled out of control. Five hours after the initial incident, the facility was in flames. Despite addressing many of the conditions that had caused the violence in the first place, officials saw another riot at the prison in December On July 12, two white police officers had stopped an African-American cab driver for improperly passing them and somehow, a story got out that the officers had killed him while he was in custody.
The unrest in Newark also inspired similar violence in the nearby city of Plainfield, which had its own riots at the same time as the events in Newark unfolded. In , four Los Angeles police officers had brutally beaten Rodney King, an African-American motorist, after a high-speed pursuit.
The incident was caught on videotape, and the footage was aired repeatedly on television news for an entire year. The use of force seemed so excessive that many people believed the officers could never walk away from the trial as free men. However, on April 29, , all four officers were acquitted. Thousands responded to the verdict by engaging in widespread arson, assault and looting, killing 53 people and injuring thousands more.
The unrest went on for six days and did not die down until the National Guard was deployed to the area. Skip Navigation. Some riots have been carefully planned in advance to protest government policies, and some have begun spontane. Activists blocked traffic at major intersections, thereby preventing delegates from getting to the conference, and police responded by firing tear gas, pepper spray and, eventually, rubber bullets, to disperse the crowds and get delegate.
The blackout, which affected only New York City, was marred by pervasive arson and. The precipitation stopped the violence in its tracks and limited t.
An analysis of the available FBI data by Vox's Dara Lind found that US police kill black people at disproportionate rates: Black people accounted for 31 percent of police killing victims in , even though they made up 13 percent of the US population. Although the data is incomplete, since it's based on voluntary reports from police agencies around the country, it highlights the vast disparities in how police use force.
Higher crime in black communities doesn't fully explain the disparities. A study by researcher Cody Ross found, "There is no relationship between county-level racial bias in police shootings and crime rates even race-specific crime rates , meaning that the racial bias observed in police shootings in this data set is not explainable as a response to local-level crime rates.
But Thompson said it also takes years of neglect, despite peaceful calls for change, for discontent to turn into violence. In the s, people engaged in nonviolent protests as part of the Civil Rights Movement, filed complaints through the NAACP, complained to media, and threatened litigation, Thompson said. In Baltimore, locals complained to media , filed lawsuits over police abuse, and, finally, protested peacefully for weeks before the protests turned violent.
In Charlotte, black communities have long complained about mistreatment by police — including, previously, the police shooting of Jonathan Ferrell , an unarmed year-old black man who was shot 10 times and killed by a white police officer after he crashed his car. It was only when these attempts at drawing attention to systemic problems failed that demonstrators rose up in violence, including in modern-day Baltimore and Charlotte.
But if you protest peacefully, they don't give a shit. A California police officer directs traffic around a shopping center engulfed in flames during the riots in Los Angeles. Social justice riots are often depicted as people senselessly destroying their own communities to no productive means. President Barack Obama , Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake , and members of the media all used this type of characterization to describe the riots in Baltimore.
It was a widespread sentiment online after the Charlotte protests, too. But riots can and have led to substantial reforms in the past, indicating that they can be part of a coherent political movement. By drawing attention to some of the real despair in destitute communities, riots can push the public and leaders to initiate real reforms to fix whatever led to the violent rage.
The s unrest, for example, led to the Kerner Commission , which reviewed the cause of the uprisings and pushed reforms in local police departments. The changes to police ended up taking various forms: more active hiring of minority police officers, civilian review boards of cases in which police use force, and residency requirements that force officers to live in the communities they police.
People would say that this kind of level of upheaval in the streets and this kind of chaos in the streets is counterproductive," Thompson said.
Sugrue agreed. Similarly, in Los Angeles, the riots led the Los Angeles Police Department to implement reforms that put more emphasis on community policing and diversity. The reforms appear to have worked, to some extent: Surveys from the Los Angeles Times found approval of the LAPD rose from 40 percent in to 77 percent in — although approval among Hispanic and black residents was lower, at 76 percent and 68 percent respectively.
It's hard to say, but these types of changes might have prevented more riots over policing issues in Los Angeles. In the immediate aftermath, riots can scare away investment and business from riot-torn communities.
This is something that remains an issue in West Baltimore, where some buildings are still scarred by the riots. In the long term, they can also motivate draconian policy changes that emphasize law and order above all else. The "tough on crime" policies enacted in the s through s are mostly attributed to urban decay brought on by suburbanization, a general rise in crime, and increasing drug use, but Thompson and Sugrue argued that the backlash to the s riots was also partly to blame.
The "tough on crime" policies pushed a considerably harsher approach in the criminal justice system, with a goal of deterring crime with the threat of punishment. Police were evaluated far more on how many arrests they carried out, even for petty crimes like loitering. Sentences for many crimes dramatically increased. As a result, levels of incarceration skyrocketed in the US, with black men at far greater risk of being jailed or imprisoned than other segments of the population.
The irony is that many of these "tough on crime" policies led to the current distrust of police in cities like Baltimore, as David Simon, creator of The Wire and former Baltimore crime reporter, explained to the Bill Keller at the Marshall Project :.
And they say, man, this guy had 80 arrests last month, and this other guy's only got one. Who do you think gets made sergeant? The police responded with wild gunfire, killing several people in the crowd and injuring dozens more. The demonstration, which drew In Los Angeles, California, four Los Angeles police officers that had been caught beating an unarmed African American motorist in an amateur video are acquitted of any wrongdoing in the arrest.
Hours after the verdicts were announced, outrage and protest turned to violence as the In the predominantly Black Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, racial tension reaches a breaking point after two white policemen scuffle with a Black motorist suspected of drunken driving.
A crowd of spectators gathered near the corner of Avalon Boulevard and th Street to watch Shortly after the School buses carrying African American children were pelted with eggs, bricks, and bottles, and police in combat gear fought to control angry white protesters Nat Turner, the leader of a bloody revolt of enslaved people in Southampton County, Virginia, is hanged in Jerusalem, the county seat, on November 11, Turner, an enslaved man and educated minister, believed that he was chosen by God to lead his people out of slavery.
Early in the morning, enslaved Africans on the Cuban schooner Amistad rise up against their captors, killing two crewmembers and seizing control of the ship, which had been transporting them to a life of slavery on a sugar plantation at Puerto Principe, Cuba. In , the U. English Captain William Bligh and 18 others, cast adrift from the HMS Bounty seven weeks before, reach Timor in the East Indies after traveling nearly 4, miles in a small, open boat.
0コメント